


Wizardry By Consent

by Sixthlight



Series: The Senior Officer Peter AU [1]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Beverley Brook - Freeform, Future Fic, Lesley May - Freeform, M/M, Molly - Freeform, also featuring, and the rest of the Usual Suspects, the Senior Officer Peter AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-25
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-10 22:44:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 61,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7864153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fifteen years after a headless body was discovered in Covent Garden, Thomas Nightingale is still the last wizard in Britain, and Peter Grant, newly appointed Commander for Community Engagement in the Metropolitan Police Service, has just learned the truth about the existence of the Folly. </p><p>He has one or two questions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I Hear You're A Wizard

**Author's Note:**

> This story exists because Ben Aaronovitch spent some time on Twitter musing about what Peter’s career would have looked like if he hadn’t become a wizard, and ended up concluding that by 2025 or so he would be heading for ACPO rank (i.e. on track to become one of the most senior officers in the Metropolitan Police Service and in any police force in the UK). I immediately wondered what Peter’s reaction would be to magic if he heard about it for the first time as Nightingale’s senior in rank and an experienced officer, rather than a probationary constable, and declared on Tumblr that someone should write the AU. 
> 
> Guess what happened next. 
> 
> Many, many thanks to stardust_rain and maple_clef for pulling beta duty once again, archiesfrog for letting me ramble at her about the plot for two hours of walking, and stardust_rain a second time for a truly heroic amount of headcanon and plot help AND making that amazing cover art. I would also like to direct all of you to [the comic of the first scene done by aiaiaias](http://sixth-light.tumblr.com/post/148961435269/aprilshydoeden-im-really-loving-sixth-lights), because IT'S A COMIC OF THE FIRST SCENE I NEARLY DIED. 
> 
> Fuckups are mine, you know the drill.

Commander Peter Grant picks up his teacup off the tray Molly has left for him. “So, Inspector Nightingale. I hear you’re a wizard.”

He is a bright-eyed young black man in a perfectly pressed uniform. Young in this case means forty or so, still, in Thomas’s considered opinion, far too young to believably outrank him. Then again, everybody up to and including the Commissioner has been far too young to outrank him for about fifty years now, so it’s not really worth worrying about.

The wizard comment, on the other hand, is.

“Yes,” Thomas says, because the only thing he knows about Grant, aside from what he can see, is that he’s just been appointed the Commander for Community Engagement - ACPO rank, although that term is, god help him, a decade out of date now. This has, apparently, caused him to be informed about the Folly’s true purpose. “I suppose you’ve been briefed on the Folly - the Special Assessment Unit, that is - on my remit.”

“If you can call that a briefing,” Grant scoffs. “They mumbled a lot about ‘events out of the ordinary’. I think the word magic might have been whispered quickly at one point. So I thought I’d come to the source.”

“I’m not sure what more you’re hoping to learn,” says Thomas. In general, by the time people hit the rank where they _have_ to be informed about magic, if they’ve avoided learning about the Folly on the way up, they’re too invested in the state of the world as it is - as they believe it to be - to really want to take it in. Grant seems…interested.

“Well, neither am I exactly.” Grant smiles, and it’s a good look for him. He is, Thomas thinks, quite good-looking in general, his neatly-trimmed hair just starting to curl. “Because nobody wanted to be specific. Everybody seemed to think I should already know who you are and what you do, and honestly, I’d heard rumours before. They just ranged from the ridiculous to the implausible, and I had a job to do. But apparently _your_ job is even more implausible than the rumours were, so how about we start with this: what sort of community are we talking about?”

“What?”

“Well, it can’t just be you, or there’d be no point having you being a policeman, would there? Police are for communities. How many people are we talking about who’re involved with - magic? In London, in England - do you have a counterpart in Scotland? They told me you have national responsibilities for this area, but when they packed up and left -”

“I honestly have no idea.” Thomas chooses to leave the somewhat fraught Scottish question alone. “In London, ah - thousands? Nationwide - I don’t know. They’re not exactly eager to engage, by and large.”

“I guess you don’t have the manpower for statistics,” says Grant, with a glance around at the Folly’s dimmed grandeur. “Unless your housekeeper has hidden skills with Excel.”

“I believe she has quite a following on Twitter,” Thomas says, which gets him a slightly startled blink. Grant’s hand twitches towards his pocket, then returns to take a biscuit. Thomas didn’t rescind obligation, when Grant took his first. He probably should have.

“Mmmm. So you’re understaffed.” Grant puts the biscuit back down, apparently distracted. “I started out, a stint in the CPU aside, with a Community Service Unit - hate crimes. Gay bashings, immigrants getting stuff nailed to their front doors, you know how it goes.” Thomas doesn’t, really, those things hadn’t been considered worth investigating once upon a time, but he supposes it’s a sign of progress that now they are. “Do you have that sort of problem in your community? Equivalent things?”

“It’s not really -” Thomas drums his fingers on the arm of his chair for a second. “I think you misunderstand my job. It’s more to keep the peace -” and out of the public eye, of course “- than anything else.”

“Mmmmmmm,” says Grant again, and Thomas has the surprising and unpleasant sense of being weighed and found wanting. “That seems like - a very narrow approach.”

“I have kept it,” Thomas bites out, as if this boy has the first idea what that’s cost or what that means. “That matters.”

“That’s not all that matters.” Grant puts down his cup and saucer, leans forward with his elbows on his knees, an alarmingly direct sincerity in his face. “But we’re getting off topic. Tell me about magic.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I’ve been told it only tends to confuse things.” People come with all sorts of preconceptions and untangling them is usually not worth the bother; he imagines Grant has plenty.

“Look,” Grant says. “I know technically you fall directly under the Commissioner, because she was pretty specific on that point, and even aside from that you’re part of Specialist Crime, but my responsibility covers community engagement across the whole city, with _every_ community. And apparently there’s a whole group of people we have a special unit just to deal with, but whose existence I don’t have the first idea about, and that’s unacceptable, frankly, so, Inspector Nightingale: please tell me about magic.”

“Sir,” Thomas is forced to acknowledge, and Grant holds still for a second, a fractional pause, then smiles again.

“Call me Peter,” he says.

Thomas continues to address Grant as “sir” whenever he gets the chance, and by his first name precisely never. It might be the only thing to do with Grant he really gets any choice in.

*

It becomes rapidly obvious that the only two things which have been standing between Thomas and Grant’s endless supply of questions – not all of which Thomas knows the answers to –– are DCI Lesley May and the grace of God. May and Grant, it transpires, were at Hendon at the same time and have a longstanding friendship. May was Alexander Seawoll’s golden girl, when she was a constable, and is about as suspicious of Thomas as her mentor ever has been. (He’s mellowed slightly since moving out of the direct line of fire; slightly.)

“I can’t believe you knew about magic all this time and _never told me,_ ” Grant says to May in tones of deepest injury. They’re standing huddled together in the street, out of sight of the public, next to a highly inconvenient and inconveniently magical crime scene. It’s May’s case, Thomas’s responsibility, and Grant who has an advisory group meeting later that day and needs a good explanation for what’s happened.

After that first meeting, Thomas used all his limited knowledge of the Internet – or Molly’s much more extensive knowledge, if he’s being honest – to find out what he could of Grant, which included footage of press conferences; he doesn’t want to say _know your enemy_ , but reconnaissance is never useless. Grant’s good at fronting to the public, quick on his feet and hard to fluster. Thomas has seen enough men and women who could deflect press questions with a straight face to not be all _that_ impressed, but – all right. It’s a little impressive. He’s not worried about his ability to carry off a cover-up, at any rate.

“Firstly,” May tells Grant huffily, “I was told not to go spreading it around, secondly, we don’t use the m-word, and thirdly, telling _you_ about it was never going to lead to anything good.”

“Does Sahra Guleed know?” Grant squints at her, unpacified. DCI Guleed is with Fraud now, if Thomas recalls correctly; she certainly knows and worked with May for a long time, having been Miriam Stephanopoulos’ sergeant for years, so likely she’s picked up on some of the odder cases. He never had much direct contact with her.

“Probably.” May glances around. “Look, we’ve got about five minutes before someone spots us all talking, can you just let us brief you on the cover story? And why aren’t we doing this in somebody’s office? You’re far too senior to be wandering around like this. You’re giving my people hives just by standing here.”

“I’ve been in meetings all week, I wanted to get out.” Grant waves a hand. “Okay: cover story, go.”

He offers three objections to the story they’ve thrown together based on the laws of thermodynamics and two objections based on the laws of probability, as well as one based on “the laws of _narrativium_ ”, whatever that is, but May browbeats him handily into submission; Thomas is quite reconciled to every suspicious look she’s ever given him.

“The m-word?” Grant asks Thomas, the next week. Thomas isn’t sure how he finds the time.

“Don’t ask me how that got started,” he says wearily. “It wasn’t me.”

“I didn’t think it was.” They’re standing in Russell Square, drinking coffee that Grant brought as a transparent but not unwelcome peace offering; also, Grant is just enough senior to him that Thomas needs a better than paper-thin excuse to avoid him. He’s itching to walk back into the Folly and not leave again for, oh, five years or so, but then Grant asks another question, or offers up a carefully impersonal anecdote, and he forgets to come up with an excuse to leave. Thomas has been around long enough to know why this feels good somewhere amidst the irritation, all that attention; but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t know better.

“You know,” Grant says, like he’s quite impossibly reading Thomas’s mind, “I feel like I’m taking up a lot of your time; are you sure there aren’t any books or anything on this?”

“They’re in Latin, for the most part,” Thomas prevaricates.

“To keep them out of the hands of the plebs.” Grant raises his eyebrows like it’s a joke, but his tone says it isn’t quite, and –

“Ah,” Thomas shrugs, feels his mouth tilt ruefully. “Something like that.”

“They didn’t exactly offer Latin at my comprehensive.” Grant sounds amiable enough, smiles back. Thomas has asked around, of course, has some idea where Grant comes from; working-class boy, went into the CPU and then the Westminster CSU, rapidly distinguished himself, got headhunted sideways into Fraud and kept climbing the ranks within Specialist Crime before he headed back into the Territorial directorate as a borough commander and now his current job. A career Met officer, and a good one. Thomas has worked with officers like him before, or – he thinks he has. Something about Grant keeps eluding categorisation.

“I must admit Latin’s lost some utility since I was that age, so it’s unsurprising it’s gone out of schools,” slips out before he can think better of it, and that is, of course, a mistake.

“I don’t remember Latin coming up that often in the nineties, although who knows what you were getting up to at public schools,” Grant says, eyeing Thomas speculatively. 

“Mmmm,” Thomas says.

Definitely a mistake.

*

Thomas is aware that many of the Rivers have active interests in a range of areas, which includes social events, but of course he’s never invited; which is why an invitation from Tyburn can mean nothing but trouble. He goes anyway. She will have a purpose, and it’s the quickest way to find out what it is.

He wasn’t expecting Grant to be in the crowd, but if Thomas considers the position he’s about to take up –  it’s the sort of thing Tyburn keeps her eye on. She’s been trying to get a handle on him through the Met for years, as well as establish her position in the city more generally. Grant’s new job means he meets with everybody.

“I’m so glad you decided to join us,” Tyburn tells him in friendly tones, but her eyes give the lie to that. “Do you know Commander Grant?”

“Inspector Nightingale, hello,” Grant says warmly, forestalling any attempt on Thomas’s part to minimise the connection. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”

“I invited him,” Tyburn says. “He doesn’t get out much.”

“Commander,” Thomas address Grant, politely. “I wasn’t aware you and Lady Tyburn knew each other.”

It was also only a matter of time, he now realises, before Grant’s continued interest in Thomas and the Folly got Tyburn’s attention. Thomas wonders, rather grimly, if this is just another of her gambits to try and shut the place, and him, down altogether. They have come to a sort of détente over the last decade but he doesn’t flatter himself that she’s given up.

“Lady -” Grant digests this description. “Have I been addressing you the wrong way, Cecelia?”

“Not at all,” Tyburn disclaims, but Grant is moving on. “And how, exactly -”

“She’s the goddess of the river Tyburn,” says Thomas, “which puts her and her sisters in my community, as it were,” and it’s worth the way Tyburn’s mouth draws into a flat line at this description; she doesn’t like him anyway. Worth it for the way Grant’s eyebrows shoot up and he glances between Thomas and Tyburn, and the way he laughs and shakes his head, taking it in.

“Goddess of the river Tyburn,” he repeats. “That makes a disturbing amount of sense, and – wait. Beverley? _Beverley_.”

Beverley Brook would be not too much younger than Grant, of course; does he know her as well?

Tyburn laughs, thawing slightly; Thomas wasn’t sure that was something she did. “I’m surprised that never came up.”

“We went clubbing a couple of times, that’s all.” Tyburn smiles thinly at that, inclining her head to acknowledge the point, and Thomas feels a certain sense of relief; maybe Grant’s not in her pocket after all. Then again, Tyburn never has quailed at dealing with people she finds useful, whether they’re the type she would find acceptable as romantic partners for her younger sisters or not.

“You know,” Tyburn goes on, “I’m not sure what Inspector Nightingale has been telling you, but I’ve been trying to persuade him the Folly has been in need of reform for years now.”

“That hadn’t come up, no.” Grant shrugs. “But then, neither had the presence of deities for local rivers. Makes me wonder what else I don’t know enough to ask about.”

 _Almost everything, and God help me if you do_ , thinks Thomas. “You seem to be managing to find enough questions as it is. Sir.”

Grant just laughs. “Nobody’s ever accused me of _not_ wanting to know, that’s true.”

“It’s antiquated,” Tyburn presses her point, “a relic from before the Second World War – nearly a century ago! – that doesn’t even have a place in the modern Met’s organisational structure.”

“Organisational structures change,” Thomas says. “My job is to keep the old agreements. And those don’t – especially not considering your family’s…longevity of tenure.”

“My mother walked into the Thames fifteen years after the rest of your friends got themselves killed,” Tyburn says. “I’d call that an opportunity for renegotiation.”

“Your mother doesn’t agree.” That’s Thomas’s big gun, of course; perhaps a little early to fire it, but Grant is looking _far_ too interested in this turn of conversation.

Tyburn goes very still, oh dear, but Grant interrupts her handily; Thomas may very well owe him.

“Are we talking the sort of agreements that are written down somewhere, or…?”

“Oh, god no, it’s all the old boys’ network, sealing-wax and secret handshakes, handed down since the end of World War II,” says Tyburn. Grant sighs at this and they grimace at each other in a way that speaks of familiarity. Thomas rescinds his previous thought.

“The better part of a century is a long time for that, though,” Grant says. “A lot of things have changed in the Met since then. But your unit hasn’t at all?” He directs the last at Thomas.

“There’s been no particular need for it,” Thomas says, perhaps a little coolly but Tyburn’s tried to corner him with higher-ranking officers than Peter Grant and failed. Richard Folsom, that was a notable attempt, and in his direct chain of command as well; Thomas feels well shot of him.

“Inspector Nightingale refuses to see the benefits of change, or take a wider viewpoint of his organisation’s responsibilities,” Tyburn says. “No community policing for _him_. He won’t even retire and let other people sort things out.”

“I don’t think he’s in any danger of needing to retire any time soon,” says Grant, blinking at him. “He looks – perfectly healthy.”

It’s only the _slightest_ of pauses, but Thomas is suddenly convinced that hadn’t been the first way Grant had thought to end that sentence, and that’s – a surprise; alright, he’d looked at Grant that way once or twice, but he’d been so busy throwing up defences against Grant’s curiosity he hadn’t stopped to notice anything else.

“I’m certainly not planning on it.” Thomas tries to sound both certain and bored; the older he gets without resuming aging, inexplicably, the less he wants to be asked for explanations, and he can only imagine the kind of interrogation Grant would be capable of on the topic. At least the backwards part slowed to a halt some years back; he has no desire to be seen as in his twenties again. Sometimes he wonders if that’s _why_ he stopped.

A slightly awkward silence descends for a couple of seconds, and then Thomas is rescued by someone taking advantage of it to get Tyburn’s attention; she’s forced to make her apologies and move on. Grant doesn’t go, just nods to her as she leaves and sips his wine.

“How do you know Tyburn?” Thomas asks once she’s gone; he might as well get a question or two of his own in.

“Met her when I moved up to borough command, she’s just been – around, local politics stuff,” Grant answers easily. “You know, I never quite figured out – I thought she was a lawyer, maybe, or lobbying for somebody. I definitely wasn’t expecting – that.”

“Well, you weren’t wrong, she represents a defined set of interests,” Thomas says.

“Is she _really_ –“ Grant begins.

“Opinions differ, but you’d have to take it up with her, or one of her sisters. I don’t suggest it, personally.” It matters less what _genii locorum_ call themselves and more what they can do, as far as Thomas is concerned. The rest is detail.

“Noted,” Grant says. “How did you meet her, if she’s, ah, _in your community_? Just go up to – wait, you can’t go _up_ to, the Tyburn’s all underground, fine, go down to the river and say hello, is anybody home?”

“I’ve known her since she was very small.” Thomas remembers Mother Thames as she’d been then, a proud young woman with her hair in a scarf and a toddler on her hip, already echoing with all the power of the tidal Thames. Tyburn had been quite a well-behaved child, as Thomas recalled. Of course, she was a well-behaved adult, as these things went; she didn’t stand for any sort of chaos. She just had her priorities, and they weren’t Thomas’s, and possibly not her mother’s, and therein lay the rub that Thomas, if he had been prone any longer to prayer, would have prayed on a regular basis never arose to trouble him. Or anybody else within the lower Thames Valley.

“Huh,” Grant says, and “Just how long _have_ you been doing this job, Inspector?”

“Probably too long,” Thomas says.

It isn’t just that he doesn’t know how to stop and in any case has nobody to pass it on to, after all these years. It’s that he has not the faintest idea what he’d do, afterwards.

*

A week later, Beverley Brook calls and asks to meet him at the café opposite the Folly in Russell Square, which is a nice touch: she’s not demanding he come to her, but neither is she walking into the site of _his_ power. Of all Mother Thames’ children, Thomas perhaps likes Beverley the best. She was instrumental in defusing the situation with Father Thames and his sons, years ago, and she has continued to build bridges since – many of which Thomas is quite sure he doesn’t know about. She isn’t Tyburn, who wields her power openly, but if Thomas needed to reach out to as many people as possible within the demi-monde, it would be Beverley Brook he’d approach.

He doesn’t think she likes _him_ very much, but he suspects that may be more a matter of age than anything else: she is, after all, very young, and younger now than her true age in appearance, which makes it hard to remember her experience outmatches her face. Thomas has known her since she was a small girl and he was still showing something of his own age. Goddess or not, he suspects he seems at best old-fashioned to her, at worst a relic. But she is always polite and never disdainful, and sometimes that’s all you can ask for. It’s more than he gets from Tyburn, certainly.

“Is there something happening I need to know about?” he asks her, once they’ve exchanged pleasantries and ordered drinks.

“More the other way around,” Beverley says. “Ty was complaining about one of your colleagues – Peter Grant.”

“I rather thought he might be one of her protegés,” Thomas says. “The new Commander for Community Engagement, previously borough commander for Kensington and Chelsea, and he’s rather young for it. A rising star. Tyburn’s type of officer, I would have thought.”

Beverley snorts. “Why, because his mum’s from West Africa and he’s heading places? I know she knows who he is, but no. Definitely not. She thinks he’s something to do with _you,_ now.”

Thomas is saved from having to respond to this immediately by their coffee arriving; much too fast with the crowd in the café, but Beverley smiles up at the waiter and of course. The Glamour.

“He’s something to do with me in that he’s been asking a lot of questions,” Thomas tells her. “We haven’t crossed paths before this, but he’s high enough in rank that he’s had to be told about the Folly – about what I do – and this has apparently inspired his curiosity. That’s all.”

“And because he’s high enough in rank, you can’t just tell him to shove off, is that it?”

Thomas tries not to grimace, and fails. “Well.”

Beverley laughs. “Sorry – I’m just surprised that hasn’t happened before.”

“The normal reaction of senior officers who’ve avoided interacting with me, upon being informed of the Folly’s existence, is to wish it and me to the devil, or at least to pretend I don’t exist. I complicate their understanding of the world. Grant appears to enjoy complications.”

“Sounds about right,” Beverley says. “I knew him a bit, a few years ago; he doesn’t seem to have changed a lot from what Ty says. I should look him up again, find out what he’s on about. And – if you like – I could ask him to stop bothering you.”

It’s an offer that is not without its temptations, but using _genii locorum_ to control officers senior to him is quite clearly over the ethical line, and…

“For the very small price of me owing you a favour,” Thomas says.

Beverley shrugs. “I’m not Ty.”

“Thank you, but no. Although – I think he would rather enjoy meeting you, so if you’re prepared to withstand his curiosity…”

“No rules saying _I_ can’t tell him to stop bothering _me_ ,” Beverley points out. “But that’s really what I’m worried about. Ty seemed to think there was some possibility of him mucking with the agreement, that he thinks the Folly needs reforming.”

“Which is what she wants, of course,” Thomas says, “but on her terms, not the Metropolitan Police Service’s – not that they’d know it wasn’t if she succeeds.”

“Mmmm.” Beverley offers no further comment on that observation. “I need to know what you think of that. Is anything going to change?”

Thomas had not considered, up to this point, that it might go that far. “Technically, he has no direct power over me; I report directly to the Commissioner. I should think we have at _least_ a decade before there’s any danger of that, rising star or not.”

There are certain unwritten rules, as well as written, about who Commissioners of the Met are, so that’s not actually a possibility Thomas contemplates seriously: then again, time marches on, and the rules are changing. The supply of officers who’ve served in Northern Ireland is going to dry up, for starters.

“No,” says Beverley, “but he doesn’t have to _be_ the Commissioner, just present a persuasive case. So – what _do_ you think of it?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas says. “I don’t know exactly what he wants. The kind of thing he’s in charge of, it’s not really related to what I do, what I’m here to do.”

“You should find out,” says Beverley. “And if I find out…”

“I’ll keep you informed,” Thomas agrees. “And the same?”

“Done.” Beverley drains the rest of her coffee. “Well, this has been pleasant.”

“Indeed.” She eyes him curiously as she stands, but Thomas means it: with Beverley the lines of what everybody wants are, at least, well-drawn.

“Say hi to Molly for me,” is her Parthian shot. Thomas never has quite figured out how Molly keeps in touch with – well. Anybody. It pre-dates his acquisition of a computer for the Folly; that’s what’s confusing about it.

*

“I just had the most fascinating conversation and I think you’re to blame for it,” is how Grant greets him a week or so later, when Thomas steps into the lobby to meet him. He’s not in uniform, for once, but his clothes are on the formal side of casual, unusual for his age, if this is how he dresses off the job. Thomas wonders if that’s about Grant, or Grant reading him.

Thomas retreats into formality, although he’s fairly certain he knows where this is going – no, _because_ he’s certain where this is going. “Sir?”

“Does _every_ river in this city have a goddess?” Grant goes on.

“Most of them.” He should invite him into the Reading Room or something like, but Thomas doesn’t want to encourage him. “I take it you spoke with Beverley Brook.”

“We had lunch,” says Grant. “I met her a long time ago, actually – she moved out of town, we lost touch. The goddess thing somehow failed to come up then. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.”

“Oh?”

“You’ve been circumspect,” which is the polite version of _close-mouthed_ , “but there’s a lot more to this than just magic, isn’t there? Beverley dropped enough hints. River goddesses, fairy markets…I reckon _thousands_ might be an underestimate.”

“Thousands – oh; the demi-monde. Ah, the magical community.”

“That’s the one.”

“It gets fuzzy around the edges, if you include everybody who knows somebody associated with magic.”

“Which is more people than you’d think, I get the impression.” Grant frowns. “Seriously, though, the goddess thing – a matter of opinion, _you_ said, but what does that mean? Really?”

“There’s entire books on that topic.”

“In Latin.”

“I did say.”

“I’ll have to add it to my to-do list.” Thomas actually can’t tell if Grant is joking. “They don’t seem much interested in anybody worshipping them.”

“They can compel it,” Thomas says. “Most of the more powerful fae can; it’s a – defensive mechanism.”

“And yet Cecelia – Tyburn – isn’t running the city, and can’t get rid of _you,_ even if she’d like to.”

“It’s possible to resist. If you keep your mind fixed on your own ideas – your own goals. And in general…that’s what we have agreements for.”

“So,” Grant says. “Gods, you’ve mentioned ghosts before, whatever your housekeeper is, don’t try to tell me there’s not something funny there, and you – what about _other_ wizards?”

“What about them?”

“They seem thin on the ground.” Grant gestures around the echoing, empty lobby. “Even if it’s like I was told, magic is ‘dying out’ – which doesn’t seem to be the case at all – there must be people who’ve retired, changed jobs, decided they didn’t like it. How many of them are there, in your magical community? How many people who can do magic _un_ officially, if you’re the last official wizard?”

“They’re dead, they died,” says Thomas, as bluntly and matter-of-factly as he knows how. “Most of them, and then the rest retired. In and after the war. Tyburn said as much, you were there, it’s true. By this stage – there isn’t anybody left under ninety-five, not……not really. Unofficially…I don’t go looking unless there’s cause. There rarely has been.”

There’s Wheatcroft’s brood of vipers – but so far as Thomas could ever determine, most of them forgot magic after they left Oxford; it was just the one, perhaps two, who’d continued on to darker places. He doesn’t count any of the others, who wouldn’t know the demi-monde if they were fished out of the Thames by a River, if the Rivers ever indulged in that sort of public service. He doesn’t feel like offering up that whole sorry episode to what would undoubtedly be Grant’s measured but pitiless judgement. The investigation, afterwards, had been quite bad enough.

“You were there, weren’t you. The Second World War.”

“What makes you think that?” Thomas has gotten _very_ good at deflecting this sort of question, but Tyburn made him say too much; it’s not going to fly for long.

“Let me rephrase,” says Grant. “A Captain Thomas Nightingale, who bears a remarkable resemblance to you, and who was born in nineteen hundred, was definitely around for it, and I’m sure you’ve got a good story about how that was your grandfather or great-uncle but your surname isn’t _that_ common.”

“It sounds like you’ve been doing some digging.” It would take rather a lot; most of Thomas’s records, particularly his Met one, have been quietly adjusted as the years go on.

“Nah, this stuff’s all online if you know the right archives. Less than an afternoon. Although I did have the distinct advantage of having had Lesley bitch at me about how her governor said you’d been showing up like a bad smell at his crime scenes, I hope you know that’s a quote, since _he_ was a constable, and that was before I was born, pretty much.”

“I’m not sure where this is going.”

“It’s been you,” Grant says. “Just you. For eighty years. The last official wizard in Britain – in England.”

Thomas just waits; it’s not as if Grant’s telling him anything he doesn’t know.

Grant shakes his head, looks down. When he looks up, there’s a light in his eyes. Of battle, maybe. “You know, I’ve been putting this off because it seemed a bit rude, but: could you _show_ me some magic?”

Thomas has been waiting for this request for several weeks, so it’s not what you’d call a surprise. “That’s a very general request. Sir.”

“Well, I don’t want to put you to too much trouble, and you’re the expert,” Grant says quite seriously. “It’s idle curiosity on my part. And very much a request, so we’re clear.”

“Magic,” Thomas says, and is about to just cast a werelight and get it over with, when another thought occurs. “Would you like to see something impressive?”

He doesn’t quite keep a straight face, because Grant looks immediately suspicious, but in a possibly unjustified display of trust says only “I’d love to.”

“When I was learning,” Thomas says, “the masters used to cast this as an example of a more complicated spell.”

*

“How long is this going to last for?” Grant shouts from the back courtyard about ten minutes later. He’s holding his jacket over his head, but the steady drizzle from the little raincloud has started to soak through.

“Another quarter hour?” Thomas calls back; he’d just popped into the back corridor to see if Grant was still there. “It’s not precise.”

“Nobody ever timed it or did a study or anything?”

“What?”

“You know,” Grant says, taking a few steps sideways for a few seconds’ respite, before the cloud drifts back into place. “Basic scientific practice: repeat it however many times you need for statistical significance, time how long it goes for, get an average. Get a bunch of people to do it, to account for variation between wizards, or whatever. You said there used to be thousands of wizards. Somebody must have.”

“If they did I wasn’t paying attention,” Thomas is forced to admit.

“Huh.” Grant squints up at his jacket, then moves it away briefly to look at the cloud; he blinks water out of his eyes and raises it over his head again. “That seems like a pity.”

“If it works, why does it matter?”

“If magic works, magic is subject to the same laws of the physical universe as everything else, stands to reason,” Grant says with exaggerated patience. “The trick is _how_. And also where the energy comes from, which frankly worries me more than anything else, because the laws of thermodynamics are the only laws that really hold up everywhere, but you’re making that face again so I’m guessing that’s not something _you_ worry about.”

Thomas manages not to say _I’m not_ trying _to make a face, sir,_ because could he sound any more like a wet-behind-the-ears constable? Probably not.

“Anyway, I hope you’re pleased with yourself,” Grant goes on, dryly. Unlike his jacket, his hair, and – increasingly – everything else about him. “I walked into this one. Next time I’ll be forewarned.”

It’s much worse than Grant just calling him out on what an incredibly childish thing it was to do: Thomas stiffens. Best to get it over with. “I overreacted. My apologies.”

Grant gives up and drops his arms to his sides, jacket dangling from one hand, letting the rain fall; it runs in rivulets over his face. “Look, I meant it: I brought it on myself. But – d’you think you could get Molly to lend me a towel? For when this finally stops.”

“I can do that,” Thomas says quickly, and turns to go.

He looks back, just before he’s through the door, and Grant is looking up at the raincloud again; he runs a hand through it, face alight with fascination, and laughs a low, delighted laugh. There are crows’ feet faintly visible at the corners of his eyes when he smiles like that, Thomas notices, for no reason in particular. The sun is out, high enough in the sky right now to penetrate into the courtyard, and there are drops of water sparkling in his dark hair; his shirt is starting to stick to his long torso. Thomas feels his stomach do a slow turn that has nothing to do with having half-drowned a senior officer and everything to do with the sound of Grant’s laughter.

Molly gives Grant three of her best towels, and hisses a laugh behind her hand. Grant grins at her with a half-shrug that says _well, at least my day was interesting_.

“You _like_ him,” Thomas tells her accusingly, once Grant is gone. “He’s the worst thing that’s happened to the Folly since – since the war.”

Molly gives him a look. Thomas sighs. “Fine. Not quite that bad. But he’s going to make trouble and he’s an up-and-comer; it could be a _lot_ of trouble.”

Molly shrugs, and it says: _maybe trouble will be good for you_.

Thomas pretends he doesn’t get that particular message.

*

As another defensive measure, Thomas introduces Grant to Abdul: he hopes that Abdul’s brain collection, at least, might drive Grant away. The use of words like _cool_ and _fascinating_ on Grant’s part do not substantiate this hope.

“So does this happen when people do magic _to_ you, or when you _do_ magic?” Grant asks Abdul.

“Both,” Abdul says. “This one -” he points at a particular favourite “is a jazz player who was killed by a – well, we’re not precisely sure – vampire? Of sorts. Sucked all the……magic…out of him. Anyway, _this_ one is a wizard, or was a wizard, so doing too much magic does the same thing. Not a career for the faint-hearted, obviously.”

“Is there any way to check on this on an ongoing basis?”

“MRIs. I’ve manage to persuade Thomas here to come for a check-up every few months.”

“And how’s his brain?”

“Perfectly fine,” says Abdul, “although whether that’s because he’s been careful or – the other thing, I don’t think I could say.”

“The other – ah, right.” Grant and Abdul both look at Thomas, their eyes assessing; Thomas knows what they’re thinking.

There’s more grey than red in Abdul’s hair now, and he’s started to make noises about having another pathologist take over the Folly cases at least part-time; Thomas has been avoiding the issue. It was one thing when the survivors of Ettersberg started to die, though a few still cling on, here and there. Abdul is of an age with their sons, young enough to be Thomas’s grandson, and now he too is growing old.

Some days – a rare, select few – it makes Thomas wonder how long he _can_ keep doing this; how long he wants to. How many friends he’s prepared to watch come and go.

“So that’s something you’d want to keep doing if we had anybody else doing magic for the Met,” Grant goes on, thankfully oblivious to Thomas’s momentary self-pity. “Check-ups. Good to know.”

“Oh, is that a possibility?” Abdul looks, horrifyingly, enthused by this.

“No,” says Thomas, a defensive reflex. Can everything he was just thinking; he’s not going anywhere until he feels like it, which will be never. 

“Anything’s possible,” says Grant. “Although that would, ultimately, be up to Inspector Nightingale and the Commissioner.”

“I’m _so_ glad you see it that way,” Thomas bites off, and doesn’t bother with _sir_ ; Abdul looks at him, startled.

“May I ask why you’re taking an interest, then, Commander?” he asks Grant politely.

“Oh, rampant curiosity, mostly.” Grant smiles. “I suddenly get told magic is real and we have a whole branch of the Met dedicated to solving magical crime – well, one DCI, anyway – an entire community of magical people we apparently have no plan for connecting with, and I’m _not_ supposed to be interested? Besides – if magic exists, and I’ve had that demonstrated to my satisfaction, there has to be some sort of scientific basis to it. And that is, quite frankly, the most fascinating thing I’ve heard in my whole life, just about. How does it all _work_?”

“ _Precisely_ ,” says Abdul, and, bother, Grant’s got him hooked. “There’s obviously some link with consciousness – I think that explains the problem with electronics somehow, since _electricity_ by itself clearly isn’t affected, it’s not a property of the electromagnetic spectrum, but how that translates from the brain to physical effects -”

Thomas doesn’t even know why he’s here, really; neither of them is paying him the least attention.

*

“So, your Commander Grant,” says Abdul the next time Thomas comes by his office. “He seems very keen. If he were ten years younger I think he’d be plaguing you to teach him magic.”

“I’m not sure he won’t anyway,” Thomas mutters, but Grant’s job precludes any real chance of that. “What, you liked him?”

“It’s always nice when people show an interest,” says Abdul. “And this is the first time you’ve had any other officer who wants to know – certainly the first time you’ve had someone senior to you who does. Aren’t you pleased about that?”

“He has a million questions, he’s friendly with Tyburn, and he keeps making noises about me on my own being insufficient to the task,” Thomas says. “And he’s got influence, he’s part of the NPCC. I don’t like where this is going.”

“Is it the having someone who’s not intimidated enough to avoid ordering you around that’s bothering you,” Abdul says, “or that your apple-cart might get upset?”

“It’s that he doesn’t have the faintest idea how all of this really works,” Thomas snaps. “All this _community engagement_ nonsense. As if any of them want to engage with me, especially after - you know what happened. He’s wearing rose-tinted glasses.”

“Then you’d best explain it. He seems very willing to listen.”

“I just don’t,” Thomas says. “Why does he think he has the _right_.”

“The world’s been ignoring you for eighty years, and you were content to let it,” says Abdul. “So now the world’s come knocking, and because you waited, it’s not on your terms. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing.”

“You just enjoy having somebody to talk over your theories with who actually knows something about science,” Thomas accuses him.

Abdul just laughs. “Guilty as charged.”

*

“I’ve got a question, Inspector,” Grant says. Molly produced tea and biscuits when he arrived without even being asked. She’s definitely taken a liking to him, of all the inexplicable things.

“With all due respect, sir,” Thomas says, “I suspected as much.”

Grant smiles at Molly as she whisks out of the room; she gives him a nod.

“I looked her up on Twitter,” Grant says in response to Thomas’s glance. “And then I tried to look her up through the Met, and I couldn’t. Do you know she doesn’t officially exist?”

“I don’t think officially existing is a great priority of hers,” Thomas temporises, being largely of the opinion that the Metropolitan Police Service probably wants to know about Molly as much as she wants to know about them. She’s here because this is her house, has been for longer than a human lifetime. Thomas is relatively certain nothing up to and including his demise – whenever and however that occurs –– will get her out of the Folly.

“It makes it very hard to get things like equal pay right if we have staff who don’t officially exist, you know,” Grant says, like this is a friendly conversation.

“That’s not part of your responsibility, so far as I’m aware.”

“We won’t be trusted to treat people equally if we don’t treat our staff equally.” Grant looks down at the teapot; Thomas has resorted to the small but satisfying pettiness of not pouring. It’s not as if Grant won’t have got the message by this point.

“You had a question, sir,” Thomas prompts. Grant is clearly weighing up whether to commit the social solecism of pouring for himself, or waiting Thomas out. Thomas is willing to bet on his own patience.

“We’ll get to that,” Grant demurs. “I also had something you probably need to know. Have you ever run into Jaget Kumar, with the BTP? He’s an inspector.”

Thomas shuffles through his most common contacts; he hasn’t had a lot to do with the BTP in general. “It rings a bell.”

“You might not have directly; he doesn’t remember talking to you. Anyway, I think he’s someone you _should_ be in touch with, he’s sort of their point man for weird stuff, which is mostly rat infestations or whatever and sometimes…isn’t. Turns out he’s run into some of Tyburn’s younger sisters a few times, something about underage drinking, I did _not_ ask, and also something about a lost civilisation under Notting Hill, I did ask about talking to them directly but apparently they’re not big on -”

“ _Lost civilization_ ,” Thomas interrupts, because _really_ , now, but Grant raises a hand and says “I swear on my collection of Discworld hardbacks and my mother’s life, he says they make pottery and did a lot of work on Crossrail, my point is that this seems like something you _should_ know about, and you……don’t?”

He manages to sound honestly puzzled, like he expected better. That stings.

“I don’t.”

“Then you _definitely_ need to meet Jaget,” Grant goes on, like it doesn’t even matter. “He can fill you in. You can’t possibly expect to know everything that’s going on in this city on your own.”

That stings, too, because it’s true; that club in Soho, more than a decade ago now, was an object lesson in the limitations of Thomas’s awareness. The women in Berwick Street, another. He has his contacts, of course, but there are things he misses. Maybe a lot of things.

“Inspector Jaget Kumar,” Thomas repeats, instead of saying anything else. “I’ll look him up.”

“I can do better than that.” Grant hands him a card; Kumar’s. “I came prepared.”

Thomas tucks the card into a pocket and feels irrationally upset; Grant isn’t wrong and it’s quite clear he needs to talk to Kumar, _lost civilisation in the Underground_ , Tyburn is going to have fifty fits – if she was unaware to start with, charming thought. But he’s perfectly capable of tracking a fellow officer down on his own, he doesn’t need to be led by the hand.

Molly compounds his vague feeling of ill-use by poking her head in, noting the empty teacups, and rather pointedly pouring for both of them before she whisks off again. Thomas supposes she objects to her efforts going to waste; as it is the tea is probably over-brewed.

Grant smiles after her, adds his own milk, and unexpectedly asks as he picks up his teacup, “Will I really be magically obliged to you if I drink this or eat these?” He points his little finger at the plate of custard creams.

That’s an unexpected turn in the conversation. “Probably – not.” Or not any more than he already is.

“Beverley Brook seemed to think it was something I should at least consider.”

“You should certainly ask for a disclaimer before you take the Rivers’ hospitality, and I don’t say that out of hostility.”

“I haven’t been to any of their houses, so you don’t have to worry.” Grant looks down at his tea, then up again. “Probably?”

“You’re not a wizard.” But then, Thomas thinks, there’s also the question of what _he_ is, and isn’t that a vexed one these days. “If it would make you feel better – eat and drink, with no obligation.”

The tea is, it has to be admitted, on the cool side. Thomas warms his up with a whispered spell, because he can do that. Grant glances at the steam now rising from his cup, glances at his own, then shrugs and drinks anyway.

“It’s not really safe at a distance,” Thomas says, relenting. “If you’ll pass it here -”

Despite everything else vexatious about Grant and his existence, the look on his face when he gets his teacup back, cradling it gently in his hands, is – it’s been a long time since anybody looked at Thomas like that.

“What about other magical traditions?” Grant asks. “No official wizards, okay. But - people who’ve moved here, maybe?”

“In,” Thomas gropes for the right words, “immigrant communities, that sort of thing?”

“Look,” says Grant, “you can’t tell me Isaac Newton was the _only_ person who ever wrote this stuff down; he wasn’t even the only person to figure out calculus. Also, you said at one point no women, and any time somebody says that it just means people weren’t paying attention. So……”

“We used to have an agreement with the Chinese,” Thomas offers. “We didn’t ask questions and they didn’t do anything to scare the horses.”

“So are there still practitioners in-”

“I don’t know,” Thomas says, perhaps too quickly. “And yes, of course there were other traditions, all sorts of things, out there in the Empire, but in general – the attitude was that if it wasn’t causing trouble, we didn’t much care, and otherwise, er…”

“There wasn’t anything you could learn from anyone who hadn’t been to Oxford,” Grant filled in. “Or maybe the Sorbonne, if you were feeling generous.”

“Actually the premier centre of magical research on the Continent before the war was the _Weiße Bibliothek_ , in Germany.” The premier centre in the world, quite possibly, according to David, but he’d pulled such a face when he’d said it. “But – yes. Essentially.”

“And yet I distinctly recall you mentioning Arabic as one of the necessary languages for studying magic.”

“I didn’t say it was a coherent worldview.”

“No.”

Grant has that look on his face again, the one where he’s cataloguing the limits of Thomas’s knowledge. It is, for reasons Thomas hasn’t quite pinpointed, rapidly becoming something he strives to avoid. If it seemed at all sensible he’d just point the man at the Folly library, or perhaps Davis, Postmartin’s successor at the Bodleian. But it doesn’t seem at all sensible.

“If you could make anything you wanted of this, of English magic, of this weird job you’ve got,” Grant says, “what would it be? Not a trick question.”

Thomas takes the time to think about this, and Grant waits patiently.

“What I want to say is,” he says eventually, “is that I’d have the Folly back, the way it was, but that wouldn’t – the world isn’t like that any more, that wouldn’t work.”

“So what does the Folly look like for the world we _do_ have?”

This is the problem: Thomas is not the person to imagine that. He never has been.

“I don’t know,” he’s forced to say again.

“Do me a favour and think about it?” Grant asks. “Just – think about it. That’s all.”

“ _That_ was your question?” Thomas asks in return. It doesn’t seem worth visiting for, but Grant nods.

“Yeah. Just that.”

*

In general, these days, Tyburn prefers to deal with Thomas at a distance; the invitation two months ago was a rare exception. Thomas prefers to deal with her at a distance, too, so everybody is kept happy. A second summons within such a short period does not bode well.

Thomas declines, partly because he genuinely does have somewhere else to be – Bromley want his opinion on a case, and he’s due to speak with the senior investigating officer that morning – and partly because it doesn’t pay to be too complaisant. Tyburn is not her mother. It’s in everybody’s interest if she remembers that.

This misfires somewhat when she tracks him down to where he’s stopped for lunch, on the way back from Bromley; not a case of his after all, so far as he can tell, although it wasn’t a bad idea to call him in. The deceased’s book collection certainly tended towards the arcane. Just not the sort with any basis in reality.

“Inspector,” Tyburn says, sliding into a chair opposite him. “I get the feeling you’re avoiding me.”

“Not particularly,” Thomas tells her. They’re in Effra’s domain, and that’s going to make Tyburn twitchy; a conversation to be careful of. “May I ask what’s so important it couldn’t wait?”

“I’ve been considering our conversation the other day,” says Tyburn. A barmaid appears with a glass of orange juice; Tyburn does, at least, thank her.

“I’m not sure there was anything to consider.” Thomas can only presume she’s referring to what he thinks of more as a conversation she and Grant happened to have in his presence.

“What if you _did_ retire?” Tyburn goes on, like this is a fascinating new concept.

Thomas puts down his sandwich. This is going to require some concentration. “I can’t imagine that’s likely anytime soon. All things considered.”

“You’re still pretending, aren’t you,” Tyburn says. ““That you’re the same person you used to be, that this is all a temporary aberration, that you can just keep on doing the same job you’ve been doing for how long – forever? – and everything will be fine.”

“Nothing’s forever.” Thomas won’t be; he’s sure of that. Even goddesses aren’t forever, though he won’t say it to her face.

“Oh, I am aware,” says the second Tyburn, “but this is the problem, Inspector Nightingale. You have a certain image of yourself, as some sort of –– bulwark of humanity against the encroaching chaos of magic. And then you started getting younger, and you thought to yourself that maybe it was some sort of blessing, since you’d sat around and failed to train a replacement, and then time went on, and on, and on, and here you still are. But it’s not true, how you think of yourself. You’re not holding the line against the inexplicable, you’re _part_ of it. It’d kill you to admit it, so you don’t; you lie to yourself and pretend it’s good old English reserve.”

“As charming as this amateur psychoanalysis is, I fail to see how it has the first thing to do with me leaving my post – which is what you want.”

“Your existence discommodes the rest of the Met already,” Tyburn says, bluntly. “They don’t want anything to do with you, they don’t know _what_ to do with you. That’s only going to get worse. So let it _go,_ let somebody else step in. It’s a historical accident that you’re associated with them anyway; you weren’t a policeman before Ettersberg, _that_ I know.”

“Let it go, and then what?”

“I don’t know. Stop thinking on timescales that don’t suit you any longer.”

It’s not untrue, what she says about the Met not knowing what to do with him. He doesn’t fit neatly into the organisational chart, his direct superiors in Specialist Crime - direct on paper, at any rate - rarely evidence any desire to provide actual oversight, and the longer he goes on the fewer truly senior officers there are who remember why he’s there. He can’t recall any of the current crop he knows well, offhand. Grant is the first above chief superintendent to interact with him, outside Tyburn’s machinations, in a long while. It’s better with the people on the ground, Lesley May and her ilk; they’re the ones who need his help, even if they don’t like it.

“There will always be a need for magical expertise,” Thomas returns, “and as you pointed out, there’s a shortage of other options; perhaps my fault, but not one I can solve by walking away.”

“I didn’t say there wouldn’t be. But who says it has to be a wizard? The Met could consult with – other people. Your view of our world is astoundingly limited, you know. Of any part of the world, actually.”

“I can’t say I see you or any of your sisters putting on protective gear and walking around crime scenes,” Thomas says. “Or any of Father Thames’ boys, come to that.”

Tyburn flicks a hand. “Not what I was suggesting. And in some ways your crime-solving is a small aspect of the need that’s going unfulfilled.”

Thomas doesn’t need her to lay out her plan; he can imagine it well enough. Tyburn in charge, of course. Regularisation. Organisation. A top-down approach.

He wonders bitterly if Grant is part of it yet, how much he’s been giving away to Tyburn by talking to the man. It’s not like circumspection has ever been a problem for him before. Dammit.

“My job has never been a matter of closure rates or convictions, but where I am is more than historical accident; there was some extensive discussion about it. Before your time, of course.”

Tyburn’s eyes narrow; she absolutely detests it whenever Thomas reminds her that his presence in this city predates hers. He’s not sure why – it’s simple fact, and she’s no less what she is for it.

She switches tack. “I’ve always wondered why you stayed small, why you never tried to build the Folly out again – that’s what I thought when I ran into the Little Crocodiles at Oxford, you know. That they were some plan of yours and Professor Postmartin’s. It seemed the sort of thing you’d do.”

“That’s never how I would have chosen to regrow the Folly,” Thomas says. “That sort of thing, a dining club, a bunch of students playing at magic - it couldn’t be what’s needed.”

He’s been thinking about it, what Grant said, the question he asked him to think about. What would it look like, if he started again. He’d looked for an apprentice for a few months, when the first real signs that magic was surging had emerged with Punch’s reign of terror and Mother and Father Thames butting heads at Teddington Lock, but there hadn’t been anybody quite right. Perhaps he’d been too picky. Perhaps he’d been too restrictive, sticking to police constables, but with the length of the training and the requirements of his job – he _was_ a policeman now, like it or not, planned or not.

“Well, then, I’d be fascinated to know what you _do_ think is needed,” but there’s no point him opening his mouth, because she plunges on, “because I’ll tell you what I think. I think what – our world – needs is integration. Enough of the word of mouth, of the agreements, of new things suddenly popping up out of nowhere – Notting Hill, for instance.”

“I did mean to ask you about that,” Thomas interrupts. “Did you know they were there?”

Tyburn _hmphs_ and doesn’t answer. “They don’t have access to the school system, or proper healthcare, or social services – you can’t tell me _you_ care about any of that. Somebody should. We need to build something meaningful, someone needs to……to take charge, and you aren’t the person for that.”

“No, I’m not,” Thomas is more than willing to acknowledge, “but that’s also not at all my ambition.”

“That’s your problem,” Tyburn says. “You have none. Then again, you never _needed_ to, did you? Everything just laid itself out, until Ettersberg.”

Thomas has no desire to tell Tyburn of his ambitions, such as they have ever been. She’s wrong, in that he’s had them, though maybe not the sort of ambitions Tyburn would recognize.

“There’s an agreement,” he says. “You know that and I know it. It’s not going away just because you think it’s outdated.”

“Agreements can be changed,” she replies, and the certainty in her voice is quietly terrifying. “You aren’t their sole arbiter. I’d remember that if I were you, Inspector.”

She doesn’t wait for his response. Thomas watches her walk away, people moving absent-mindedly out of her path, her heels clicking against the wooden floor.

His lunch has rather lost its flavour, but he makes himself eat anyway. No point letting it go to waste.

*

This isn’t new, what Tyburn says, but there was something in her demeanour that was new – some confidence. He considers talking to Oxley and Isis, seeing how the other half of that delicate balance thinks; rejects it. The upstream Rivers, the sons of Father Thames, have always been far more interested in ecology than politics. He considers speaking to Beverley Brook, rejects that too. She’s still Tyburn’s sister. She’d called him to mention her conversation with Grant, true to her word, described him indulgently as _too curious for his own_ good and _probably too smart for his own good too, but his heart’s in the right place, you don’t need to worry about him._

Then there’s Mother Thames – that’s always a last resort, especially if he has to go to her, which of course he will. It doesn’t quite constitute a loss of face, but it says – to her and to everybody at her court – that he has a problem with her daughter he cannot solve, and that could have…consequences. There’s no risk that requires that, yet.

Instead he takes aim at the only part of this developing mess that he has the slightest chance of affecting, and calls Commander Grant. Grant’s questions are difficult and his possible association with Tyburn worrying, but he’s also genuinely fascinated with magic, with the sheer _possibility_ of it. Thomas is willing to be that he can get something honest out of him, if Tyburn is really moving against the Folly in a serious way.

“Inspector Nightingale,” Grant answers the telephone once his assistant patches him through; the one thing Thomas will hand him is that, having not been offered the courtesy of Thomas’s first name, he’s never used it. “This is a pleasant surprise. Unless you’re calling to tell me you’ve got a problem which affects my area of command, in which case it’s just a surprise, but I think that would have worked its way up to me via my actual subordinates first. Is there something I can help you with?”

“I’m not sure, sir.” Thomas has thought about how to phrase this; possibly, now the moment is upon him, not hard enough. “Have you been talking with Tyburn?”

“That’s a broad question,” Grant says. “But in the sense I’m guessing you mean it, no. Why?”

“I thought about it, your question the other day,” Thomas says. “And I have one in return. What is it you _want_? Why do you care about the Folly so much, now you know about it?”

“Hello.” Grant sounds disbelieving. “Magic. Ghosts. Probably actual deities. In my city. Mucking with the laws of physics, as well as the laws of the land on occasion. What other sort of motivation do I _need_ to be interested?”

“You’d be a practitioner, if you could.” Now Thomas has said it out loud it’s an obvious conclusion.

“I was paying attention to what you said about learning magic,” Grant says, after a silent second; a hit, then. “Ten years, and if you do it wrong you pretty much give yourself early-onset Alzheimers, if you don’t just drop dead of a stroke. Not really the sort of stage I’m at in my career. How on earth did you deal with that sort of training time, back in the day?”

“We started very young, eleven or twelve,” Thomas says. “Boarding school. Most of us, anyway; there was the odd exception.”

Grant wins himself some credit by forebearing to reference a certain popular book series, but what he says is almost worse. “There was something at Oxford after the war, too, or so I heard from Beverley. People trying to learn. You didn’t mention that, earlier.” 

“That was _nothing_ to do with me,” Thomas snaps, “nothing I would have sanctioned and nothing I – why would Beverley Brook tell you about that?”

“I asked her, about other practitioners,” Grant explains. “After you said you didn’t really know, I thought she might, she seems to know a lot of people. She didn’t tell me much, she’s not big on letting go of other people’s secrets. Just that there’d been some, unapproved or unofficial or whatever, not your students. Sounds like there’s a bit more to it than that.”

Thomas remembers the club in Soho, the red velvet curtains and dim lights, the silent scream of the demon trap, that head in its glass case, and – he doesn’t care what Grant wants to imply or what questions he asks, he’s not going to talk about that. Nobody who didn’t have to see it ever needs to know about that. 

“You want to know about that, look up the files,” he says, because the full copies are at the Bodleian with Davis; only the edited versions are in the Met’s records. Safe enough.

Of course, there’s the rest of it, too, what happened in Berwick Street before he ever found the club in Soho, that smug bastard in his mask and those three women, victims in the end, whatever else they’d been over the years. The inquiry, afterwards, all the rest of it. Grant will find that if he goes looking. But Thomas isn’t trying to hide from that, can’t. Grant will make what he makes of it.

“I’ll do that,” Grant says. “I’m not trying to accuse you of anything, Inspector. I promise.”

“I appreciate that, sir,” Thomas says. He feels old.

He complains to the only person who’ll listen: Molly. Normally he’s cautious about entering her domain – belowstairs is foreign territory, always has been –– but she tolerates it on occasion.

 “I’m really worried about all this,” he tells her. “Tyburn’s plotting something and I can’t tell if Grant is part of it or not. Either way, he won’t stop asking questions. And you bring him tea and biscuits – are you really talking to him on the Internet?”

Molly nods absently, takes the lid off a pot and pokes at the contents. Thomas doesn’t try and look; Molly’s dangerous with a wooden spoon.

“You like him,” Thomas goes on. “But I can’t understand _why_. He’s charming enough in person, but does he ever bloody shut up or stop thinking?”

Molly shakes her head and laughs. Thomas wishes this were funny. 

“I really feel like you should be on my side in this,” Thomas says, feeling quite bitter. They’ve known each other for over a century. They’re _friends_.

Molly shrugs.

*

As a last-ditch resort, Thomas goes to the Commissioner. It’s as helpful as last-ditch resorts usually are.

“I really don’t know what to say,” she says to him. “Do you know why Commander Grant is taking such an interest in your unit? You’ve never really had much of a, er, community element to your work, so far as I’m aware.”

 _The curiosity which killed the cat_ , Thomas does not say. “The whole concept, er, intrigues him. He seems to think there’s - heretofore unrecognised overlap between his remit and what we do.”

“I had been given to understand,” the Commissioner says, “that the magic was, and I quote, ‘dying off’. But that was two years ago when I was appointed, and my predecessor was told the same thing, and yet – if anything, you seem busier than ever.”

Thomas has dealt with plenty of Commissioners in his time; it’s a five-year standard appointment, which by now makes it feel like there’s a new one every time his back is turned. Anybody who’s at all likely to be appointed Commissioner of the Met already knows about the Folly long before they get to the position, but how _much_ experience they’ve had with his cases varies.

This particular Commissioner is in her sixties and not afraid of her grey hairs, projects an air of terrifying competence, and comes to the Met after a series of Chief Constable roles; as qualified as you can possibly be for the job. The ‘first woman’ stories in the media had dried up a few months after her appointment, which Thomas suspects is the result of some stringent media management. The closest she ever got to a Folly case before being made Commissioner, if Thomas recalls correctly, was when she was still a DCS with the Thames Valley force, and he doesn’t think they ever met then - it had been largely handled at a lower level. She hasn’t been as hands-off as some of her predecessors - one or two of whom had avoided him assiduously past the initial meeting - but she seems to regard him and the Folly as an inexplicable quirk of the Met, occasionally useful but at best a cause of problems. This is, to be fair, largely because if any of his cases get as far as her it’s because there’s been trouble. The sign of him doing a good job is that there’s nothing to report.

What he’s hoping is that she’ll see the risks of someone in Grant’s position taking an interest in the Folly - _especially_ someone in Grant’s position, which is all about the public face of the Met. Nobody wants the Folly to get anywhere near the public face of the Met. That’s a first he suspects the Commissioner would go a long, long way to avoid.

Unfortunately, though, she’s got the wrong end of the stick about magic. It’s a story Commissioners have been telling their incoming successors for a few decades now; it seems to make them all feel better. How it survived Berwick Street he has no idea.

“That may have been an exaggeration, ma’am,” he says. “It was true in the fifties, but things have been – coming back.”

“In that case, does Commander Grant not have a point? If there’s enough people involved with this to constitute a community, which we essentially ignore aside from you -”

“I,” Thomas says. “I appreciate his motives are good. But, with all due respect, ma’am, he’s not a wizard, he doesn’t know nearly as much about the magical world as he thinks he does, and I need some reassurance he isn’t going to be allowed to interfere. There’s a delicate balance, and -”

“You’ve been singing that song since I was in primary school, as far as I can tell.” Normally words like _wizard_ make Thomas’s seniors backtrack quickly; this one is made of sterner stuff. They’re not generally prone to referencing his age so baldly, either. “Listen, Inspector –– Commander Grant isn’t in your direct line of command, not least because you don’t _have_ one, although he makes a good argument that given your historic lack of attention, not to mention staff, to address the less, er, confrontational aspects of our organisation’s job -”

Thomas doesn’t know exactly what his face looks like, but it’s enough to make the Commissioner break off. “Anyway. I do appreciate what you’re saying. But you may want to consider the points he’s making. He’s not the only one making points.”

“Ma’am.” Thomas tries not to sound pleading. He’s far, far too old for pleading.

“You have my assurance,” she says, “nothing’s going to happen to you or the Folly without your cooperation. There’s the, ah, national aspect to consider. And I’m not sure I actually _want_ more…wizards…in my police force. We’ve survived so far.”

If that’s the best he’s going to get, Thomas is quite, quite doomed.

He’s just not sure to what, yet.

 

*

“I’ve been going through some of your old case files, like you suggested,” Grant tells him, falling into step beside Thomas has he makes his way out of New Scotland Yard. He doesn’t think it’s any sort of accident. Grant doesn’t act surprised to see him, and Thomas offers up the bare courtesy of not asking what he’s doing here. “The actual case files. Not the expurgated versions that go into HOLMES. Although the differences were very instructive for one or two of them, I have to say.”

“How on earth did you – have you, sir.” It’s not an elegant recovery.

“At the Bodleian,” Grant explains. “The research librarian was very helpful, eventually.”

This, Thomas thinks, is what happens when he doesn’t spend enough time getting to know people. Harold Postmartin would have gone to Casterbrook if the school hadn’t closed, had in fact barely missed out on attending, and has known Thomas most of his adult life, not to mention many of the other survivors of Ettersberg. His handpicked successor as administrator of the Folly’s archives is a pleasant enough man, helpful whenever Thomas needs help, but Thomas is the only wizard he’s ever met and all the history of the Folly is just that to Davis: history. Easy enough for Grant to talk his way around that, apparently, with all the authority of his position.

“Anyway,” Grant says, “I thought we might have a chat. You busy?”

“Actually -”

“Not a problem,” Grant replies at once. “I only have half an hour free today. But my Friday is miraculously and mysteriously clear so far. How’s yours?”

“Friday would be fine, sir,” Thomas concedes.

“Relax,” is Grant’s parting shot, “I really do just want to have a chat.”

Doomed.

*

“Why are you a police officer?” Grant asks. It’s Friday; they’re in Grant’s office. It’s not the sort of question Thomas was expecting him to lead with.

Thomas isn’t, really, somewhere deep down. He’s a wizard. But that’s hardly politic to say. “What else should I be?”

“Good question,” says Grant, slapping down a file for sudden emphasis, “because this isn’t policing.”

“I beg your pardon. Sir.”

“I have a speech on this for functions,” Grant says, “which I’m going to spare you, but what it comes down to is this: you can’t police a community without being part of it. The – what was the word you used – the _demi-monde_ , the magical community, you’re not _policing_ it, you’re the next best thing to an occupying force. I’m starting to see where Ce- where Tyburn’s coming from.”

“Sir,” Thomas says, feeling his lips compress to a thin line, but he remembers: he was a soldier, once.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Grant goes on, “I think you’re doing the best job you can do but it’s not _enough_. It hasn’t been enough for years. Maybe it looks like enough from a high enough viewpoint, but get down into the details and it’s not.”

“Why are _you_ a policeman, then?” Thomas asks, because he’s had –– enough.

Grant just raises his eyebrows and leans back in his chair. “Do you want the short version or the long one? Actually, never mind – you asked, you’re getting the long one. Lesley asked me this once when we were finishing up probation and it’s taken me about fifteen years to really get it right.” He laces his fingers together, as if to discourage his hands from escape. “I’m a police officer because – we have police because we have a set of rules we all agree on that make society pleasant to live in, right? And to make people keep the rules, we _also_ agree that you need a group of people who have the power to enforce that through violence. Which sounds pretty bloody dystopian, but that’s what it comes down to, doesn’t it? At the end of everything, if somebody doesn’t want to follow the rules, we get to break out the tasers and batons and CO-19, and _you_ get to kill people with your brain.”

“That’s really not -”

Grant loses the battle and waves a hand. “I was quoting, never mind. The point is. If we’re going to do that, then it’s important –– it’s the most important thing – that everybody _agrees_ on how we enforce the law. Because there’s forty thousand people in the Met and eight million people in London town and if that comes to a war, we don’t win; we’re not an army. So the police can’t just be there to enforce the law. We have to go out there and make people _want_ us to enforce the law. We have to be on their side. On _everybody’s_ side. We have to make their lives better by existing. It’s in our fucking original instructions; _maintain the respect and approval of the public,_ emphasis, as far as I’m concerned, on _respect._ Otherwise at best you get a lot of graffiti in places it shouldn’t be and at worst you get riots. It’s hard, and we don’t always get it right, not by a long shot, but my job, where I am now, where I’ve got to? I get to try and do that right. And you, this, the Folly.”

He taps the pile of case files. Thomas has finally recognized the top one; it’s the report on Berwick Street. Not the inquiry, later; the report Thomas had filed, after. Before they’d found the club, after he’d killed Wheatcroft’s student.

 _It’s not enough_ , Grant had said, and when Thomas meets Grant’s eyes he recognizes a grim sort of determination, a look that says that Thomas – that he – that –

Eighty years, and Thomas has had to choose every time because there wasn’t anybody else left, and what surprises him right now is not that Grant, who is after all so very young, thinks he has the right to call him to an accounting – the young are always righteous –– but that Thomas wants to let him.

“You aren’t doing it right because you can’t,” Grant goes on. “It’s been, what – eighty years? More or less. Eighty years calling the shots on how to keep the peace, and when I talk to people they call you _the Nightingale_ , and they respect you – even Tyburn, you’d be surprised – but they don’t really trust you and you have to avoid fights because if you lose one, that’s it, you’re done, you’ve got nothing to hold the peace _with_. It’s a tightrope walk and it looks like you nearly fell off a few years back in Berwick Street, nobody has anything good to say about it, and what happens when the next one comes along? Or Tyburn makes her move? Or someone gets off a plane at Heathrow and you don’t see them coming? Or you think you see them coming, and you’re wrong.”

“That’s a lot of ifs,” Thomas says. “And when you say _you can’t_ – you don’t even know what you’re talking about.” Pause. “Sir.”

“Maybe I don’t,” Grant allows with an unholy amount of grace. “But what I’m actually _trying_ to say is that you don’t have to. Keep doing it this way. It’s too much for one person and it has been for a long time, even with all your little tweaks to the system. If this is worth doing, you need help. You need people. So let’s _get_ them for you.”

“There was an agreement,” Thomas says, suddenly weary, “a long time ago. Ask the Commissioner. I can’t just put a request in for a constable or two. There are – oaths.”

“Would they _have_ to be trained in magic? For legwork, backup, just going out there and _talking_ to people, that sort of thing. People to speak softly, even if you’ve got to keep carrying the big stick.”

“If it was really going to be helpful, and for ‘just talking to people’, absolutely, but – there’s never been anybody who _wanted_ to, who I could trust; you think I’ve never tried?”

Grant makes a face. “Seriously? Because if _I_ was a constable – but like I just said, forty thousand people in the Met, I know people in other forces, we can find you somebody. What do you even need, in an – apprentice, is it?”

Thomas isn’t even sure how the conversation got to this point. “Some familiarity with Latin would help. They’d need to be clever, obviously. Not easily discouraged. Willing to deal with things they don’t understand. Able to look at things objectively, from a scientific viewpoint, if you like. Tough.”

Grant’s nodding like he’s taking mental notes. “What about if I found you someone who knew about magic already? Not the way you do it, if you really are the last official wizard in England, but there have to be people from immigrant families, maybe even relatives of your old colleagues, unofficially. We had that conversation.”

“Do you have somebody in mind?”

“No, it’s a hypothetical for now. _Would_ it help?”

“I – perhaps. Perhaps not, if they were set in…other ways.”

“Right.” Grant leans forward again, elbows on his desk, intent. “So if I brought you some candidates…”

“I told you, the Commissioner –”

“Let me handle the Commissioner,” Grant says firmly. “So?”

Grant isn’t in charge of him, in any way that matters; Grant doesn’t know what he’s doing, Thomas is almost sure; Thomas could refuse and walk out, tell him no –– what will they do, ask him to resign? Thomas looks at the cooling cups of tea Grant’s assistant brought, that they’ve barely touched, and thinks, _he came to my house and ate my food and that’s an obligation, wizard or not, I could_ , _Molly could,_ and.

There’s more than one way to fall off that tightrope Grant talked about, isn’t there?

“If you could find anybody who’d be willing to consider it,” Thomas says, “I’d be happy to at least interview them.” He hopes it sounds less like _help me_ aloud than it does in his head.

“Fantastic,” says Grant, and smiles. “Thank you. I really think we can help each other here.”

“Thank you, sir,” Thomas says. It almost doesn’t hurt.


	2. Testing Times

Thomas was expecting Grant to have trouble finding anybody who’d want to chance a transfer to such a small and poorly-regarded unit, hoping it might get Grant off his back for a month or two. He’s certainly not going to go looking for candidates himself; it would be far too much like agreement. With any luck, Grant won’t find anybody, and the whole issue can be allowed to quietly die.

The first week without any questions, demands, or uninformed speculation is nearly relaxing. The second seems to drag in some indefinable way, although he puts it down to not having any current cases and dedicates himself instead to tidying up the teaching lab, which he hasn’t set foot in for at least a decade. He gets back from a follow-up meeting with Lesley May over their last case (she’s as hostile as ever, no matter her friendship with Grant) and checks the notepad next to the telephone in the lobby. There aren’t a lot of messages these days, since he gave in and purchased a mobile phone a few years back, but people do call occasionally.

Molly drifts in to arch an eyebrow at him.

“Just checking,” he says. “No messages?”

She smirks and shakes her head. Thomas scowls; he doesn’t know what she’s trying to imply.

When he’s gone, he looks at his phone. Newer than a few years old; it had taken three breaking before he’d realized the correlation between magic and dead electronics. He hadn’t intended to mention it to Grant, out of pure pettiness, but Abdul had given the game away for him. He hasn’t succumbed to the temptation to silently kill anything electronic Grant carries, though, because that would be a little _too_ petty.

He has no new messages, either voice or email or text. It’s not like he was expecting anything.

The phone rings – the main line in the lobby, not his mobile – when he’s in the mundane library. Molly reaches it first, as usual, but that’s largely because Thomas trips in the doorway between library and lobby; something must be pushing up the edge of the carpet there. He’ll have to ask Molly to look at it.

“Inspector Nightingale,” says Grant. “Sorry it’s taken me this long to get back to you.”

“This lo- not at all, sir,” Thomas says. “I can’t imagine you’ve found many takers.”

“I hope you have time this week for interviews,” Grant says, “because I found you some candidates.”

“Plural?” That’s startling.

“Four,” Grant confirms. “I don’t know if any of them meet your requirements _exactly_ , but give them a shot, okay? I’ll send you their files.”

“If you have the time, I would appreciate some explanation of your reasoning,” Thomas says, as politely as he’s able. It’s not _entirely_ a stalling tactic.

“Okay, that’s fair,” says Grant, surprising him. “My calendar’s pretty full this week, entirely unlike any other week, obviously, I’ll have to get back to you.”

“Very well, sir.”

“I’ll be in touch. Thanks, Inspector.” Grant sounds rather dry; Thomas suspects his motives are more transparent than he’d like.

Full calendar or not, the files turn up via courier the next day – Thomas is aware that these things _are_ principally electronic in this day and age, Grant is to some extent humouring him, or perhaps reaching out halfway – and their contents surprise Thomas. He had some hazy expectations of the sort of officers Grant might be able to drag into this. Those who are discontented in their current positions, who don’t have promising careers ahead of them in other units. If asked directly he would have said that of course Grant was unlikely to choose the sort of people who’d once filled the Folly, but his subconscious had mentally sketched in faces like those of his lost colleagues; at the least, he’d expected men, or mostly men.

Three of the four Grant has presented him with as options – who have presumably consented to be put forward, he doesn’t think Grant would waste his time with anybody who he was unsure of – are women. Two have university degrees, only one is from London. Annabel Sterling attended a grammar school and knows some Latin; Malini Choudhury doesn’t stand out in any obvious way, although her record is good and speaks to a proactive nature; Matthew Blake has been based out of Charing Cross and Grant has appended a hand-written note to his file, _you’ll have seen him around, he was there for your thing in Regent’s Park in November_. His thin face does look vaguely familiar. He’s bilingual, which Thomas supposes is a good start, not that Welsh has ever had any sort of utility for magic, or at least for formal Newtonian magic. The last one, Abigail Kamara, Thomas can’t make out at all; she’s a DC with Fraud, shows every sign of a promising career, no reason for her to want to make this sort of sideways jump into the unknown and unofficial.

“Oh, _that_ I can explain,” Grant says when they meet. “I know it looks on paper like she wouldn’t be interested, but she’s bored rigid where she is and she’s got the right…personality type, I think.”

“What does _that_ mean?”

“She remembers everything and if she’s really made up her mind wild horses can’t make her budge, which seemed useful given all the……what did you call it…glamour.”

“I take it you know her personally?”

“She’s my – second cousin? Third cousin? I can never get it right. Saw her at a family wedding last week, got chatting. You’d be perfectly entitled to reject her on grounds of gross nepotism, I know.”

“Considering the usual selection process for my old school, which was _did your uncle or cousin or brother or father attend_ ,” Thomas says, “I feel that would be just a _touch_ hypocritical.”

“And we’re not -” Grant waves his hand like he’s searching for an explanation. “On average I see her about once a year; I brought it up when I saw her because I don’t _know_ that many junior officers any more, I wanted to know what she thought it would sound like as a job offer, at that stage in her career. As soon as she figured I was serious she was practically ready to bang on your door.”

“I find that somewhat unlikely,” says Thomas. Overt enthusiasm has never been a particular feature of the rest of the Met when it comes to his area of expertise. Being the Met’s expert on magic is like being a tax collector. His necessity is acknowledged, his presence never welcome.

“I don’t understand anyone who wouldn’t jump at it, honestly,” says Grant. They blink at each other for a moment in mutual incomprehension.

“So,” Grant says. “Anything else you want explained?”

Thomas taps on Choudhury’s file. “Nothing wrong with her, but…”

“She knows about this stuff already,” Grant says. “Or at least a bit of it, I didn’t interrogate her. You’ll probably want to dig into that. But it seemed like it might be helpful, you said it might be. So. Interviews? When?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Thomas said. “Sitting across a desk from them, asking questions – it’s not going to tell me much their files haven’t.”

“It might tell you whether you’re going to want to murder them after a day or two in close proximity.”

“I trust,” Thomas says, “that you’re taking this seriously enough to have evaluated them on that score. Sir.”

“You want to murder _me_ about one time out of three you see me, Inspector,” Grant says very blandly. This is, in point of fact, untrue, because he knows precisely what it is to want to kill someone and this isn’t at all it.

But punching Grant in his handsome face is a fantasy which does, very occasionally, appeal.

“Nevertheless,” he says, ignoring the way Grant’s mouth quirks, “I think a more – practical – trial would be the best option.”

“By which you mean…”

“Next time I have a case I could use help on, send them my way.”

Grant pushes back and crosses his arms. “And how long is that likely to take, do you think?”

“I honestly couldn’t say.” Thomas pauses. “I’m kept busier than I was, these days. Not too long.”

Grant looks down at the files. “Look: I’m not going to lie. You’re not going to get rid of me _this_ easily. But if you’re never going to say yes to any of them, say no now. It’d be better you did that than gave me excuses for the next however long; that’s not fair on any of _them_.”

“It’s not an excuse,” Thomas says, somewhat stung, but – alright; he’s dragging his feet, he can see what it looks like. “I mean it. I promised – I said I’d give anybody you found a chance.”

“Which one, then?”

“You want me to pick one?”

“I want you to take all of them,” Grant says, spreading the files out in front of him. “Ten years of training, you said, and they’ll need to live in for most of it; anything could happen in that length of time, you need options. But I am aware…” He trails off. _Of exactly how far I can safely push you_ , Thomas fills in. “That this only works if you’re invested in it working. So if one is all you’ll take, then yeah. Pick one.”

Thomas stacks the files on top of each other, taps them against the desk. “I said I’d give them a chance. Next time I have a case. My word on it.”

Grant gives him a slow, thoughtful smile. “Then I suppose we’ll have to hope you get a case sooner rather than later.”

“It always feels so unfortunate,” Thomas muses, “wishing for somebody else’s misfortune.”

Grant grimaces. “Fine, you’re not wrong, but you’re not giving me much other choice here, Inspector.”

Thomas has to shake his head at that, because if anybody in the room isn’t being given a choice – but Grant knows that, of course. He’s never pretended not to.

*

Unfortunately for the victim, and presumably fortunately for somebody – Thomas wouldn’t go quite so far as to say fortunately for him – the much put-upon DCI May and her team are presented the very next week with a battered corpse in the Thames. It’s identified by Grant’s friend Kumar as belonging to one of the Quiet People. Tyburn is still upset over being blocked from marching in and regulating them to her liking; the case is delicate, involves multiple areas of jurisdiction, and is not at all the sort of thing he wants to throw constables he doesn’t know at.

On the other hand, it’s also the sort of case that would normally result in him running all over London and trying very hard to look like he’s doing nothing of the sort, running all over London being well below the dignity of a DCI, so having people to send is really, well. Perhaps not such a bad thing.

The constables – apprentices that may be – are all duly polite, somewhat uncertain, trying very hard not to seem so. The faces may be different from the ones Thomas supervised, all those years ago; the rest is the same. There are a number of nervous jokes, particularly about Harry Potter. Thomas defuses them effectively by not paying them any attention.

He wonders what Grant told them, exactly, how they’ve been primed to view him, to view magic in general. There’s no easy way to ask them, no way to ask Grant without coming across as defensive at best, antagonistic at worst. Knowledge of the Folly is surprisingly widespread among senior officers, word-of-mouth doing its work, although the coverage is not by any means total - witness Grant himself. Constables very rarely encounter him unless they work directly on cases or for a unit like May’s at Belgravia, which is the closest specialist homicide unit to the Folly. He can’t be sure what they might have known before – there are a number of silly rumours floating around, as Grant had alluded to upon their first meeting, and some equally silly nicknames, most of which he’s sure he hasn’t heard. The only thing to do is observe.

The case turns out in the end not to be the sort of thing that’s his problem at all, aside from the identity of the victim; a hit-and-run, with the culprit panicking and trying to dispose of the body. Standard sort of police work, but figuring that out is in and of itself is a good test of his prospective apprentices. The trick, which the vast majority of the other officers he works with never acquire, is accepting the presence of the weird and extraordinary, that it doesn’t ultimately change the nature of the job, that it can be commonplace, without losing sight of its consequences.

In the process, having subordinates proves helpful immediately, when they need to talk to the victim’s family.

“It can’t be you,” Inspector Kumar tells him without hesitation. “No offence, but as far as I can tell you’re a little…heavyweight, for this.”

“I’ve had some constables seconded to me for the time being,” Thomas tells him. “Perhaps one of them?”

“Perfect,” Kumar says. “Whichever is the shortest, for preference. It gets a bit cramped down there. And if any of them are women, they’re a bit old-fashioned -”

“We can’t let them think -”

“- so it’d probably put them less on their guard,” Kumar finishes.

“Ah,” says Thomas. “I see.”

He wonders if this was the sort of thing Grant was thinking of. Without this trial, he’d have had no choice but to go himself.

Instead he sends Annabel Sterling and Abigail Kamara. Abigail has already had a run-in of sorts with Olympia and Chelsea, the closest Rivers. Thomas has a suspicion they may have been keeping the existence of the Quiet People out of their elder sister’s view; not that he’s going to get within a million miles of an intra-family Thames dispute, but interesting to know. The constables report back that everybody is very upset but, as far as they can tell, nobody has any obvious grudges.

“Anyway, I’m pretty sure none of them could drive safely, they seem very sensitive to light. And noise,” Abigail says. At that stage they haven’t got the car or driver; that comes later. “Unless they got someone else to do it for them, of course.”

Malini Choudhury gets to hunt down some of their pottery; Thomas wants to get a sense of what sort of magic it is, exactly, these people do. Matthew Blake goes through CCTV footage, very patiently, to identify where the victim came from and how he got to where he was going. All the little things he’d normally do himself, or not do, or have somebody else’s constables do for him and have them not be sure why. Yes, there could be benefits to this.

He lets Lesley May’s team make the arrest, once they’re sure there aren’t any magical repercussions. Abigail makes a face when she hears that, but none of them complain. It’s another thing they’re going to have to learn, that their job isn’t just to make collars, it’s to keep things quiet, and that mostly means staying out of the spotlight. He doesn’t think they’ll have any trouble with that, even Abigail. He knows what curiosity looks like and they all want in, all want to know more about this, even if they express it in different ways. It’s the only good reason to take on an apprentice, he concluded a long time ago. It couldn’t ever be anybody who wanted to look good, or the power of it. They have to want to know for its own sake.

That’s the point when he realises he’s going to keep them, if they’re willing to stay. Abigail says _yes_ before he can get half a sentence out, and _you’d have to throw me out_. Malini says _really, sir?_ and _do we get to learn magic?_ and _of course, of_ course. Annabel says _is it all of us_ , and _I was hoping but I didn’t want to get ahead of myself._ Matthew says _thank you,_ and _as long as we don’t have to sign anything in blood,_ and when Thomas looks at him _sorry, sir, joking_ , which might be the first time for that.

Despite Grant’s assurances, the Commissioner provides some slight resistance when he brings them to her office.

“I was under the impression this was in the nature of a trial,” she says, frowning. “I expected it to take a little longer.”

“It was, and the trial period is over,” says Thomas. The constables, not quite yet apprentices, stand stiffly in their uniforms.

“We don’t want any more Berwick Streets,” says the Commissioner. Thomas can almost hear the constables making a note of that.

“This is a precaution against that, ma’am, if anything.”

“I hope so.” She’s still frowning, and Thomas keeps his expression relaxed by sheer force of will; surely she doesn’t mean to call it off _now_. But she turns to the constables. “All right, let’s get this over with. Hold up your right hands, and after me…”

Thomas didn’t expect to push for this, but here he is. He’d expected at least one of them to prove frankly unsuitable in some way, would have had no compunctions about sending them back to their unit if so, but evidently Grant has an eye for personnel. If it came to a matter of picking at random, there are differences between them - Abigail clearly takes everything he and anyone in authority says with a grain of salt, Matthew always stops to think before he does anything and Malini rarely does, Annabel might be able to put the fear of God into a rabbit if it was a particularly small rabbit - but nothing to make any one of them seem head-and-shoulders above the rest. Come to that, given that they’ll need to move into the Folly, he wouldn’t feel terribly comfortable moving in a woman on her own - there is of course Molly, but that’s not quite the same thing - and it certainly wouldn’t be reasonable to take on Blake solely on those grounds. Might as well take the lot, then.

He feels vaguely manipulated but also like that’s not exactly fair. Grant was nothing but upfront with his intentions. And yet. He resolves to be more careful with Grant in future. Obviously the man has been paying more attention than Thomas quite realised.

Grant doesn’t hang over Thomas’s shoulder once he decides to take them on, quite the opposite; Thomas sees less of him than he has for – well, months, now. He only takes advantage of his rank the once, just after they’ve all moved into the Folly, to sit in on their very first magic lesson.

“I’ll stay in the corner,” he says. “Very quietly.”

“Sir.” Thomas has to think this over. “May I ask…”

“Fifty percent curiosity, fifty percent wanting to see how they take it,” Grant says promptly. “Okay, twenty-five percent wanting to see a spell that doesn’t result in an unplanned trip to the drycleaner. Yes, I know those don’t add up.”

“I wasn’t going to – yes, certainly, sir,” Thomas says. “If you have the time.”

“I’ll make it.” Grant eyes him speculatively. “Thank you for indulging my curiosity, Inspector.”

It doesn’t feel very indulgent. Thomas doesn’t say so.

Grant is as good as his word and is very quiet, in his corner, so much so that Thomas might almost have forgotten he was there as he demonstrates a werelight for the apprentices – simply, brighter, softer, under water, until he’s sure all of them have felt the _forma._ That’s the easy part. The rest of it is up to them, and Thomas wonders how many he’ll lose here; it happened at Casterbrook, long ago, always a few boys who went home after the first term and never came back. He was told anybody could learn magic, but he has come to think since then that not everybody necessarily wants to.

Then again, these four are here by choice, weren’t packed off by their parents; surely that counts for something. He leaves them practicing. Abigail, Thomas notes, has rolled up her sleeves, like she’s preparing for a fight. Matthew has his eyes closed. Annabel is perched cross-legged on a stool, which seems like a recipe for disaster.

Grant ducks out with a nod to Thomas, presumably off to do his actual job, and you’d think from his face he’d taken the whole thing as commonplace. But Thomas had glanced over, while he was holding the werelight underwater, and there’d been something else in Grant’s expression then. It was the same thing as when he’d run his hand through the raincloud, or cradled his cup of reheated tea: pure, absolute wonder.

*

The apprentices obviously find the scale of the Folly intimidating. He waits for the questions – where’s everybody else? What happened? – but they don’t come to him, just get whispered between each other, when he’s thought to be out of earshot.

Molly makes all of them jump. That was, perhaps, to be expected. But they’re polite to her as well, which is, while not a failproof test of character, something.

Malini’s connection to magic is, at least, easy to explain; he’d asked her directly, the first week, since Grant had said she knew something.

“My grandmother,” she says at once. “She learned when she was a little girl, from her mother. She’d make lights for us to put on the river, during Diwali.”

“How do you know it was magic?”

Malini gives him a scornful look before she manages to straighten her face. “I know the difference between fire and magic, sir. And she said a spell. But I don’t remember it now, it wasn’t in Rajasthani or Hindi.”

Sanskrit, maybe, Thomas thinks; he remembers some of the practitioners in India using that language for their _formae_ , before the war. “Do you know where she learned it? Out of curiosity.”

“Her mother,” Malini says. “But I think she - my grandmother’s mum, I mean - came down from the Punjab during Partition, and I don’t know what happened to the rest of her family. Anyway, my grandmother died last year. But all it is, is that when Commander Grant started asking me questions, like what did I think about ghosts and stuff, I told him my grandmother could do magic.”

“You weren’t worried about being laughed at.”

“He didn’t seem like that was what he wanted to do, and anyway my guv - my old guv I mean - said if I was lucky I might get picked for something interesting, so I told him the truth. And she was right - here I am.”

“Well, I’m glad you think this is interesting, Constable,” Thomas says; before he’d asked she’d been frowning doubtfully at some Latin exercises.

She looks down. “Okay - sorry, sir, this bit isn’t so much, but I’ll get through.”

“I don’t have any personal stake in your interest in the classical languages, carry on,” says Thomas.

Abigail Kamara hasn’t yet mentioned her connection to Grant – Thomas wonders whether she doesn’t want favours or expects extra scrutiny because of it. There’d been plenty of both of those things in the Folly of his youth, your fortunes not exactly riding on those of the father or uncle or cousin or grandfather who’d come before you, but not exactly unconnected, either. For all they’d claimed it was strictly about your talent. Like Abigail, Thomas’s closest connection had not shared his name – his mother’s brother – but in any case his own name had been more important than that, even by the time he’d been Abigail’s age.

She does share her cousin’s scepticism about all things magical, but also his willingness to accept the evidence of his eyes and senses.

“I always knew there was stuff out there,” she says after seeing what Thomas had thought was her first ghost. “There’s a ghost under the railway bridge near my school – my comprehensive, I mean. I saw him loads of times. He always does the same thing.”

“Vandalism, drunk, or…” There’s only so many options in that kind of location.

“Graffiti,” says Abigail. “He never finished it. It’s almost scrubbed off now. I wonder if he’ll go when it does.”

“Paint doesn’t hold ghosts well,” Thomas says. “It’s probably in the railway tracks, or the concrete. Those will last a while. Did you ever find out his name?”

“I thought about looking it up when I started with the police, accidental death records or whatever,” she says. “But then I thought, how am I gonna explain that if somebody finds me, and…” she goes quiet for a moment. “I thought by then, maybe I was imagining things. It’d been years since I went back. Not a good look, wandering around on the railway tracks, when you’re a probationer.”

“Did you ever tell Commander Grant about your ghost, by chance?”

“Nah,” she says. “Oh, wait, maybe I did. But I don’t really – I might’ve had a bit much punch. Anyway, that was years ago.”

“You could look it up now,” Thomas says. “If you’re still curious. And you have spare time, of course.”

Abigail gives him a sideways look, like this is a suspicious offer, and just says “Yeah, maybe, I guess.”

She never brings it up again, but two weeks later he gets an email with a record attached and the subject line _found him._

“You should write it up,” Thomas tells her at dinner. “Ghost-hunting is a very old tradition for apprentices. There’s a whole section in the mundane library.”

“I don’t know how you ever find anything in there,” says Annie, who has been Annie since she’d looked like he was personally injuring her, the one and only time he’d used her full first name. “A card index!”

“You’re welcome to initiate a digitisation project if it can be made sufficiently secure.” That gets a suitable look of sudden horror, and subdued giggling from everybody else.

“Thanks, sir,” she says. “If I’m ever that bored.”

“Don’t think you’re volunteering me,” Abigail says with an emphatic point of her fork.

“It might be fun?” Annie doesn’t get any takers on that one.

In some ways she’s the easiest of them for Thomas to understand, a grammar school girl whose familiarity with Latin extends beyond knowing it exists. In others not at all; she’s bright but easily distracted, always thinks the _why_ of things is more important than the _how,_ and is perhaps overly fond of an orderly existence for someone who aspires to magic. Or police work. Although there’d been plenty of those in the old Folly; they’d just stayed behind while Thomas had been out in the Empire.

“This doesn’t make sense, though,” he hears Matthew saying to her one afternoon in the lab, as he’s coming to check on them. They’re all still struggling through the first and most tedious stage of learning, trying to achieve their first _forma,_ and Thomas is still uncomfortably aware of the risk one or more of them won’t manage it.

“Of course it makes sense,” Annie says. “If it wasn’t this difficult everybody’d be doing it, wouldn’t they?”

“Making stuff happen with your mind, though.”

“You’ve seen him do it.”

“That’s why I’m trying.”

“I can feel it getting closer. Can’t you?”

“Yeah, but then I think it might be all in my head.”

“Just because it’s all in your head,” Annie says seriously, “doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

“Ugh,” says Malini. “Okay, two hours, I’m done. Yesterday my arm cramped so hard I dropped my laptop on my foot.”

“Oh, no,” says Annie. “Is it alright?”

“Oh, yeah, the laptop’s fine,” says Malini, in a fascinating display of youthful priorities. “And my foot. Not like I had one of those ones when we were kids, you know, they weighed like two kilos. At _least.”_

“Oh, would you look at that,” says Matthew, very softly, and Thomas realises Abigail hasn’t said anything, and also that at this point he’s eavesdropping, but if he felt what he thinks he felt –

“Ow!” exclaims Abigail, on cue. “That was hot. I don’t think it’s supposed to be hot.”

“Who cares, do it again,” Malini urges her.

“Okay,” Abigail says unsteadily, and Thomas definitely feels it that time, a whisper of something that might be a _signare_ one day; magic.

“It really is real.” There’s something like wonder in Matthew’s voice.

“What, like it wasn’t before?” Abigail retorts.

“Well, yeah,” says Malini, “but if you can do it…”

Thomas takes himself off; he will doubtless hear about this officially sooner rather than later, best not to be caught listening in.

But he doesn’t bother buttoning down his smile as he walks away. One down, three to go.

This might just, after all, stand a chance of working.

*

The apprentices make the Folly feel fuller and lonelier at the same time. It might have been different with one person, but four is enough to recall what it was like when it echoed with all his friends and colleagues. But it’s _not_ just him and Molly any more, and he can’t get lost in his thoughts for more than a minute or two, it feels like, without a question or the sound of footsteps or a passing _hello_ intruding.

He doesn’t quite know how to ask her, but he thinks Molly likes having new people, once she gets used to them; certainly she gets very enthusiastic about the expanded opportunities for catering, sometimes less than successfully. Annie is the only one who takes uncomplainingly to Molly’s repertoire. The four of them only slip out for dinner about twice a week, but of course they don’t think to invite him along, and then Molly always looks disappointed - or perhaps disgruntled, they’re often similar with her - so he’s been eating in rather more than has been his custom in the last few years. Decades. Maybe that makes Molly happy, too. He’d feel better about that if it involved less of a sacrifice on his part.

He wonders occasionally if it would have been different if he’d just acquired a single apprentice: if they might not be at quite such a distance, outside of lessons and casework and meals (not that that isn’t a lot of togetherness, all added up). But you can’t be friends with your subordinates, of course, and he rather suspects the inherent competition of watching each other try, and fail, and succeed is moving all of them along the path to wisdom - such wisdom as Thomas has to offer, at any rate - rather faster than any one of them might otherwise have.

Abdul is very pleased to meet them all, and perhaps not only because it offers the opportunity for getting some more data on how magic affects the human brain. While none of them quite matches Abdul’s particular scientific enthusiasm, their newness to magic makes them more inclined to ask questions Thomas either has given up wondering about or never been interested in the answers to.

“How does it work, though?” asks Matthew, frowning at Abdul’s brain slices like they’re something far more innocuous than they are. Abigail is dubious, Annie clearly making an effort to look at them, Malini looks like she might be sick. Thomas eyes up the rubbish bin in the corner of the lab, just in case.

“You mean, how is the damage done?” responds Abdul.

“I…think so,” says Matthew. “It’s just that with dementia and that, it’s a process, you get the plaque formation and then the cells start to die off; it’s not that quick, even with the early-onset forms. And this just…happens, people drop down dead?”

“Oh, I see what you mean.” Abdul nods. “The effects manifest like a stroke, but that’s not really the right way to describe it-”

“We always thought of it as a kind of stroke,” Thomas has to put in. “How is it not?”

“Wrong way round, and neuroscience was barely getting to grips with how strokes worked back then,” says Abdul, which as Thomas understands it is somewhat unfair but he supposes science has moved on. Not that he’s paid much attention to it. “Strokes happen because blood supply gets cut off to the brain; that’s what does the damage. This has the damage without the blood supply being affected directly. Unless what causes the damage is over-use of magic constricting vascular flow, but that seems like an even more unlikely mechanism than the direct effect on the brain. At least you’re using your brain to do magic.”

“Vascular flow?” Matthew says doubtfully.

“Blood flow,” Abdul corrects himself.

“So what you’re saying is you don’t know how it works.”

“More or less,” says Abdul cheerfully. “But we know it does work, so all of you should take note when Thomas tells you how long you’re allowed to practice in a day.”

Abigail makes a face. “I like my brain intact, yeah.”

“You know a lot about neurobiology,” Annie says to Matthew afterwards. “Wanted to be a doctor once?”

“My mum wanted me to be a doctor,” says Malini. “For about five minutes. Then I fainted when my brother broke his bone, you know, when it comes through the skin -”

“Ugh, do you have to,” says Abigail.

“- and she thought maybe not,” Malini goes on.

 “No,” says Matthew to Annie. “Just did some reading, when – family stuff, you know.”

“Oh! Okay,” says Annie, sounding guilty. Matthew shakes his head. “It’s not – a big deal, like.”

“Mum or dad?” Abigail wants to know.

“Mum,” says Matthew. There’s a rather awkward silence as people nod, and then look away.

“The really dangerous thing about overdoing magic,” says Thomas, because he’s not sure he really should be involved in this conversation and is quite sure he doesn’t want to be, “is that often the very first sign of anything being wrong is when you fall down with what Dr Walid would call the symptoms of a stroke. So you’ve always got to underestimate your reserves.”

“I get tired when we practice,” says Malini, slowly. “But it’s not the same as getting tired with exercise.”

“You can be very physically tired and still do magic, though it makes it harder,” Thomas says. “It’s not a perfect correlation. But it’s a useful indicator.”

“Well, look at it this way,” says Abigail. “I bet if we do kill ourselves with magic Dr Walid will totally steal our brains for science.”

“Is that supposed to be helpful?” demands Malini.

“Not really,” says Abigail. “But at least we’ll be making a continuing contribution.”

“Please, don’t,” says Thomas. “It’s really more paperwork than I want to think about.”

*

It is conveyed to him, via Beverley Brook, that it would be appropriate for one or more of his new apprentices to introduce themselves to her mother. He considers the possible consequences of sending them all and picks Abigail, who is both one of the more circumspect of the four and probably knows a lot of women like Mother Thames and her court, if not _quite_ like Mother Thames.

“She wanted to know why you’d decided to have apprentices _now_ ,” Abigail reports back.

“And what did you tell her?”

“That you had more work than you could do on your own,” Abigail replies. “That’s what you said, isn’t it? More or less.”

“More or less,” Thomas agrees. “What did you think, overall?”

“I don’t know if she’s really a goddess,” says Abigail, “but I don’t think it matters what I think about it. What do _you_ reckon? Sir.”

“What you just said,” says Thomas. “More or less.” He thinks about this. “I think she’s as close as you’re ever likely to encounter in your lifetime, and certainly one of the great powers of this island, so call her whatever you want to in your own head, as long as you’re respectful otherwise.”

“Mama Thames didn’t expect me to be,” Abigail says, cannily. “Respectful, I mean. _Wizards_ , she said. _All of you are proud_.”

“There’s some history there. Not with her, so much, but before her time, when it wasn’t just me in the Folly.”

“Yeah, I can just imagine,” says Abigail, eyeing the statue of Newton.

*

Sometime in March, an oddly warm day for the time of year, although perhaps not so odd in this century, Thomas gets a call he always hates to get; a probable vampire nest identified, through the usual measures. Some mysterious disappearances, a body with the characteristic injuries, the spreading aura of death and the _tactus disvitae_. Well, the local borough commander doesn’t say that last bit, but it’s what it adds up to.

He grabs his cane and coat and considers which of the apprentices to take with him; not all of them, too much potential for confusion. He decides to leave it to chance and tries the mundane library first. Annie is sitting at the nearest table to the door with books spread out in front of her and headphones on. He has to rap on the table to get her attention.

“We’ve got a call-out,” he says.

“What’s it about?” she asks, pulling out the earbuds and stacking books neatly.

“You’ll see when we get there,” Thomas tells her. This is, he thinks, the sort of thing she’s going to need to draw her own conclusions on.

*

Annie looks terribly small next to Frank Caffrey - she’s walking evidence of the abolition of the minimum height requirement - and Thomas could perhaps wish he’d found one of the others first, but if she can’t deal with this then best to know now rather than later, and it’s not as if physical strength has the first thing to do with this part of their job. Unless one is terribly, terribly unlucky. Thomas hasn’t been for decades, but luck is a funny thing.

She takes it coolly when they find the vampire, checks for a pulse with a frown of concentration. It’s when she stands up she makes the connection about the grenades; she doesn’t say anything, keeping quiet as instructed, but she goes - well, it’s hard for her to go paler, but her freckles stand out. Unfortunately, this time the vampire is holed up in a basement flat - the disappearance of the residents above had been the signal, along with a complaint from the neighbours about dying plants  - so the fire has to be carefully managed. Frank Caffrey gave instructions about where to place the grenades for maximum effect, while allowing time to prevent the entire terrace going up.

The vampire is in the bedroom right at the back of the flat. He sends Annie to place hers in the bathroom, slightly further up the hallway. This turns out to be an excellent thing, because it means she’s not there when the vampire wakes up. Thomas has dealt with this before, but there’s something about vampires, attacking, that freezes even the most experienced men; it may be some sort of glamour, Thomas has never spent long enough around a living vampire to figure it out.

He tosses his grenade, throws a couple of pieces of furniture at the vampire - harder without his staff - and makes a swift exit. The agreement had been on the count of ten and it’s not quite there yet, so he calls to Annie.

“Throw it and get out!”

He’s past the bathroom door as he does, but she darts out hard on his heels. There isn’t room in the hallway to let her past and still move quickly. They’re out of time, and Thomas throws up a hasty shield behind them both.

Annie shrieks in a really heart-piercing way, and Thomas whips around to see that the vampire, thrown forward by the first blast, has her by the leg. Before Thomas can react she’s kicked backwards, breaking the creature’s nose, and thrust out with _impello_. Of course, the problem with vampires is that they suck up magic, so it’s not an impressive attempt - he’s seen her do better in practice - but the creature staggers back. Annie throws herself forwards and Thomas grabs her by the arm and swings her past him, shielding again; the second grenade will - there it goes. The air is already thickening with smoke from the first. If only that were as damaging to the vampire as it is to them.

They make it out the front door, and Thomas barricades it shut with the rusty bicycle in the sunken area outside the door, working quickly; not unobtrusive but it’ll do. Annie is coughing.

They wait, and they wait, the heat starting to rise and smoke to creep out under the door, but the vampire doesn’t emerge. There are sirens in the distance, Frank on schedule, so Thomas ushers Annie back up the steps to the road.

“That was a vampire, right?” Annie asks once they’re back in the Jag. Her voice is still rusty; so is Thomas’s. He sighs internally; next stop UCH, for his sins. He might leave it alone for himself but smoke inhalation isn’t a joke, and it’s not just him.

“Yes,” he says, as she hacks away again. “They consume magic. And life.”

“Are they like ghosts?” Annie wants to know.

“In what way?”

“You said ghosts weren’t - people, just…copies.”

“They’re remnants of people, yes,” Thomas says. “But the whys and wherefores are rather less our problem than stopping them.”

“The whys and wherefores matter.” Annie takes in a breath, has a coughing fit, takes another. “Or we just murdered somebody, no? And that wouldn’t be all right. So it matters.”

“I have to ask. Is that something you think I would require of you?”

“No!” Annie exclaims, with genuine horror. “No, sir, not at all, it just helps if - it helps if I think through it out loud.”

Thomas remembers Berwick Street, and realises he isn’t looking forward to explaining that case to Annie, or Abigail, or any of them, if he has to. When he has to.

“We’re not different from other police officers, really,” he tells her. “We have the same duties and the same problems, more or less. The peace and how to keep it. The people of this city, and this country, and how to keep them safe, from each other and themselves. It’s just the details that are different.”

“Right,” Annie says, a little uncertainly, and then more firmly. “Right.”

He’s about to drive off when there’s a knock on the car window; it’s Frank. Thomas rolls it down.

“Fire service is taking care of things,” Frank says, “but can I have a word?”

“Go on.”

“No offence to your constable, but - just to you.”

Thomas has known Frank for thirty years and knew his father and grandfather before him; he wouldn’t ask that if it weren’t important. He gets out of the car.

“Listen,” Frank says. “There wasn’t time to mention it earlier when there was this to deal with, but - there’s been some questions asked. I thought you should know.”

“By whom and about what?”

“My higher-ups. Not in the Fire Service; the other higher-ups. About Berwick Street, what happened back then. They were very interested in what orders you gave us. Who we were told to shoot at, if shooting was needed.”

“I haven’t had anyone ask me about this,” Thomas says slowly, has to pause to cough. “Thank you for letting me know.”

“We know you do the job you have in front of you.” Frank’s voice grows firm. “You know none of us are going to let them have anything to use against you - if there was anything, which I don’t reckon there is.”

“I know. Thank you.”

“How’re the recruits doing?”

“Well enough,” Thomas says. “Annie - Constable Sterling - did well in there. It woke up.”

“Thought I heard a bit of screeching. Not much to her, is there? Don’t the Met have a height requirement?”

“Not for a while now. Doesn’t stop her doing her job.” Thomas feels defensive, wonders when that happened, when Annie - all of them - had turned into people he wanted to defend. “If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, you’ll still have someone to call out about this sort of thing. You should be pleased.”

“Yeah, a bus, that’s exactly what’s going to stop you.” Frank snorts. “Right, well, you two had better get away - and to hospital, smoke’s nothing to laugh at with modern furniture.”

“That’s where we’re going,” Thomas promises him, and heads back to the car.

“Sir,” Annie says as he opens the door, “I don’t want to be a nuisance, but I was looking it up, and we really should -”

“We’re going to UCH.” He starts the car. “Let somebody know we won’t be straight back to the Folly.”

Annie is coughing again, but gives him a thumbs-up he catches in his peripheral vision as she fumbles out her phone.

They’re both given a clean bill of health after an hour or two kicking their heels in A&E, and told to avoid smoke and other irritants for the next while. When they get back to the Folly, there’s another round of questioning; Thomas keeps an ear out for the first bit of it to make sure Annie isn’t giving anybody the wrong impression.

Molly stops him to frown at him; she never likes it when there’s a vampire nest, always scrutinises him on return. He’s not sure what she’s looking for, if she could sense infection. Maybe she could. Whatever it is, though, she doesn’t find it, just brushes something off his sleeve, gives a nod, and carries on.

“But did they _sparkle_?” Malini is asking.

“No!” Annie exclaims. “No. It’s not…it wasn’t funny.”

“Was it creepy?” Abigail wants to know, sounding perhaps a little _too_ fascinated.

“Yeah,” Annie is saying. “It was that.”

“You all right, sir?” Matthew asks, as Thomas makes his way past the group. The others stop to hear the answer. 

“Oh,” he says, surprised. “Fine, we both got checked out at A&E.”

“Er, good, alright then,” Matthew says, like he’s surprised himself by asking, ducks his dark head.

They’re growing on him, these apprentices he didn’t quite ask for.  Maybe it works both ways.

*

Grant comes by one Thursday afternoon - closer to evening, really - not so long after the vampire nest, asking about references on _genii locorum_. Apparently he’s been talking to Beverley Brook some more.

“She’s big on not talking about other people’s business, though,” Grant says. “Which I respect. Cecelia, Tyburn I mean, _will_ , but she also gives me the strong desire to get a second opinion on some of the things she says.”

So he’s been talking to Tyburn, too. Thomas reminds himself to keep remembering that. Grant isn’t necessarily a friend.

“The only reference I have on that which I could in all conscience recommend is - you’ll be surprised - in Latin,” says Thomas. It has the benefit of being true. There are stacks of books in the mundane library dealing with the topic and at least three-quarters range from inaccurate to what could, based on his experiences of the last half-century with the Thames women, be charitably described as libellous.

To his surprise, Grant replies “That’s all right, I just might need it a bit longer.”

“What are you planning on doing, getting it translated?”

“Tempting, but you’d never agree to lend it to me then,” Grant says cheerfully. “Which is a really atrocious information security policy, mind you, I bet you have the only copies of a lot of things.”

_If only you knew what we have the only copies of,_ Thomas does not say; Christ, that’s not something to joke about. “I don’t think there’s been quite enough time for you to have learned Latin.”

“Oh, not really,” says Grant. “But I have a dictionary and a language app, and I’ve been poking at it. _Mensa, mensa, mensam, mensae, mensae, mensa_.”

“ _Why_?” Thomas has to ask.

“Haven’t had anything else I really needed to read up on recently,” he says with a shrug, which is obviously a lie. Someone at Grant’s level probably has a desk-high stack (or…Thomas has no idea what the equivalent would be in digital form) of reports and white papers he could read if he made the time.

“What’s the latest around here?” Grant continues. “Anybody blown anything up yet? The Harry Potter movies tell me that learning magic should definitely involve magical explosions at least occasionally. It keeps the comic tone.”

If Grant wants to get a rise out of him he’s going to have to try harder. “No explosions to speak of. You didn’t choose quite that terribly.”

“Oh, not terrible, was it?” Grant’s eyes glint. “Such high praise. I’m so glad you’re impressed with me, Inspector.”

“Was there something I was supposed to be impressed by?”

That’s blatantly over the line towards a senior officer, and Thomas almost wishes it back, except for the fact that Grant’s smile widens. “I don’t know what impresses you. After all this time, I’d imagine not much.”

“I’m not that old,” Thomas says. “There’s still a few things.”

“ _Are_ there,” says Grant, and, as if realising exactly how ridiculous this conversation would probably sound to a third party, “Good to hear they’re working out, though. I hoped, but there wasn’t any way to be sure.”

“There never has been; there was always the chance one or more of them couldn’t master magic at all. Some people just don’t - no patience, or no capacity for it. You hit the mark with all of them there.”

“Well. Think of it as a favour,” Grant says. “Not the kind you’re obliged to repay or anything, just keep it in mind. I’m hoping it helps your impression of me. Very slightly.”

“I can’t think what you’d want a favour from me for.” It comes out a lot more cutting, and horrifyingly, a lot more suggestive, than Thomas had intended.

“I’m sure you can’t,” Grant agrees, shifting his weight so his slight advantage of height turns into something not quite a lean, and that’s – oh, good God, this is the last thing he needs.

Thomas doesn’t pull away, though, because it feels obscurely like that would be losing. Grant’s eyes widen very slightly, and he shifts back.

“Anyway,” he says. “I need to get home and figure out whether any of the mystery items in the bottom of my freezer are still edible. It’s always good to have a surprise at the end of the day.”

"Stay for dinner,” Thomas says, on impulse. “There’ll be enough. Molly likes leftovers.” What she does with them is, of course, one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Folly, but Thomas had been taught never to pry belowstairs if it wasn’t doing any harm.

“I – wouldn’t be fair,” Grant says. “To the constables. Apprentices. This is their home, they’d have to be on their best behaviour, no warning.”

“Quite,” Thomas says. “Forg-”

“But,” Grant stumbles on, “we could – go out? And eat? Unless that would upset Molly?”

Thomas should probably think about this a bit harder, but he feels a sort of odd recklessness. “I don’t think so.” He pauses. “Thank you for the invitation, sir. Yes. I’d be pleased to.”

Grant hesitates like he’s trying to parse _yes_ with Thomas’s retreat to formality – good luck to him, Thomas is trying to parse it himself. Then he smiles, and Thomas realises that even formality won’t keep him safe. From Grant or himself, he’s not sure.

“How do you feel about sushi?”

“Well, you definitely don’t get _that_ out of Molly’s kitchen.”

This is the worst idea he’s had since 1944. Possibly before then.

*

Given that Grant’s the senior officer, Thomas is prepared to go where he wants, but Grant asks if he has any recommendations around here and Thomas takes him to his usual restaurant, on New Row. It’s not too busy on a Wednesday night, and not too – anything else, either. Grant eats with chopsticks _and_ maintains an easy flow of conversation, nothing work related, trying, Thomas realizes, to draw him out a little. They talk about the cinema, music, a little politics; Grant asks circumspectly if Thomas has counterparts on the Continent, and makes hmmming noises when Thomas isn’t as forthcoming as he’d clearly like. Then he drops the topic entirely, although it’ll be raised again later, Thomas is sure.

He proves surprisingly knowledgeable about jazz, even older stuff that was popular when Thomas was young the first time, but shakes his head when Thomas says he must like it quite a lot.

“Not really.”

“You’re very well-informed.”

“It’s…” Grant waves his chopsticks. “Complicated.” He picks up a piece of sushi roll, frowns at Thomas like he’s trying to decide something. “Ever heard of Richard Grant?”

Thomas has to think about it for a second, grope for context, but when he does – “Your…father?”

“Mmmm,” Grant agrees, mouth full of food, pauses to swallow. “Couldn’t avoid knowing jazz if I’d wanted to.”

“You seem to have paid quite a lot of attention.”

“Well.” He frowns again. “Okay, it’s a lie that I don’t like it – some of it I like a lot, but it wasn’t something I could choose to like or not like, so – I said it was complicated.” He looks down at his food. “I, ah. Do you go to concerts and things? Wait, that sounds -”

“Not often,” Thomas says honestly, to rescue him; the tips of Grant’s ears have gone a faint red, and he realizes with some surprise he’s been handed a genuine confession. He wasn’t sure Grant was capable of it; he was sure Grant didn’t like him enough for it. “Now and again, but if I’m by myself people always want to have conversations -”

“Oh, I bet they do,” Grant says, grinning, and then his ears go red again and Thomas ploughs on to avoid dealing with that “- about other shows they’ve seen and that sort of thing, and I get so bloody tired of remembering what’s plausible for me to have been around for.”

And that’s a confession from _him_. This is – where is this going?

“Well, it’d be a moving target, wouldn’t it,” Grant says thoughtfully. “Difficult to update. If I didn’t know better I’d say you were my age, and if that were true you’d barely be old enough to remember when my dad was in his prime. But you’re not the only person in that situation – there’s the Rivers and some others -”

“I can’t be friends with them,” Thomas has to say, another moment of unwanted honesty. “Not and do the job I have.”

“I think that’s exactly the wrong way to think about it.” Grant takes a breath. “But I didn’t ask you o– I didn’t – I’m not here to play that tune for the fiftieth time.”

“There’s one bar in Soho I go to sometimes, the live jazz is pretty good,” Thomas says. “It’s not that far.”

“Um,” says Grant, and “Yeah. Okay. Let’s.”

It’s a worknight, and Thomas arrives back at the Folly before midnight, relaxed in a way he thinks it is probably very dangerous to be relaxed around Grant. Grant has gone to – wherever his home is, in the city, Thomas doesn’t know, hasn’t asked. He doesn’t know Grant very well, really. Hasn’t wanted to. Hasn’t thought it was safe to.

Unfortunately, the operative word there is “hasn’t.”

*

The next time he sees Grant is a couple of weeks later; this time he at least gets the courtesy of a phone call beforehand. Maybe that otherwise poorly-judged dinner was good for something.

“I need to ask about something and you’re not going to like it,” Grant says. They’re in the armchairs in the atrium; through a quirk of the Folly’s heating, it’s the warmest spot in the building. Grant had seemed about to offer an opinion on this when Thomas mentioned it, but managed to restrain himself. No adjustments to the Folly have ever seemed worth it when it was just Thomas and Molly there; maybe that will change, with apprentices.

“Do I ever, sir?” Thomas retorts, but largely in jest.

Grant raises an eyebrow. “I like to think I’ve got a fifty/fifty hit rate.” When Thomas doesn’t respond, he goes on. “This…ring of magicians from Oxford you were tracking down, a few years back. The Little Crocodiles. Why did you put so much effort into that? Just the idea of people doing magic outside your control?”

“You know about the best-trained of them? The one who ran the Soho club. That’s what worried me. Anything _half_ that bad would worry me. A quarter.”

“I read that report,” Grant says levelly. “Then I didn’t eat for the rest of the day.”

“I didn’t put anything in there I didn’t have to.” It had been worse than that, but Thomas hadn’t wanted to recall the details; it had only needed to be sufficient to convince his superiors of the necessity of his actions.

“You didn’t find the club until after he was dead, though.”

“No.”

“You know,” says Grant, “last I checked we got rid of the death penalty a while back.”

“There are some things you don’t come back from,” Thomas says. “Death magic -”

“Bullshit,” Grant says. “People kill other people for power all the time. Not magical power, fine, but still power. We still don’t execute them. Why’s it different because magic is involved?”

“You can’t stop a trained practitioner with a prison sentence, not if they don’t want to be stopped,” says Thomas. “You’ve seen enough to know this. They don’t need equipment or aid; they carry their power with them. Put him in jail and he would have walked out again.”

“Well, that’s the trick, isn’t it,” Grant says. “People have to accept they deserve to be in there, or at least that getting out isn’t worth it. Or they have to be powerless enough there was no chance of them escaping anyway. Is this a problem that’s come up often?”

“Thank god, no. There was one Russian woman – but she wanted above anything to avoid returning to Russia, so we only had to threaten her with deportation if she was arrested again. She served her sentence quite happily, and she’s actually assisted me once or twice, with small things. Mostly she just wanted to be left alone - the trouble was the lengths she was willing to go to in order to ensure that.”

“What about – before?”

“It happened.”

“And people were executed.”

“It was a different time.” Thomas rubs his forehead. “That’s not intended as an excuse.”

“Your faceless friend died while I was a constable; that’s not a different time.”

“Why are you asking about all of this now? I know you read these files before you encouraged me to take an on apprentice. It was a memorable conversation.”

“Annie told me about the vampire,” says Grant. “It was dead, it wasn’t human, she said. I believe her. But that, and this, and the Soho case – it makes it look like you only have one solution to difficult problems.”

“Are you checking up on my apprentices?” Thomas demands, a little too loudly.

Grant takes it coolly, doesn’t flinch. “Checking in with. It’s really hard to say no when I’m me and they’re constables barely out of probation, so it’s my job to make sure they’re not regretting saying yes.”

“I think you’ll find that’s my job,” Thomas says, trying not to snap. His apprentices; his responsibility; his job.

“Those can both be true.” Grant meets his eyes, but Thomas wonders if he’s had second thoughts.

“I wouldn’t keep anybody reluctant,” he says. “A waste of my time and theirs.”

“They had to swear an oath.”

“There’s plenty of precedent. What do you think happened to everybody who gave up magic after – after the war? Even before it, people broke their staffs – people left.”

“But you’d never get another chance at training anybody.” Grant smiles thinly. “You barely got this one. So you’ve got quite a lot of incentive to keep them on, seems to me.”

“They’re my apprentices,” Thomas insists. “These things go both ways. They took an oath and because of that I am responsible for their well-being, and if you think I would endanger that for – for politics -”

“Don’t knock politics,” says Grant. “Politics is just people and power. The only way to avoid it is to be a hermit, more or less.” He pauses. “For what it’s worth, I believe you.”

This is, frankly, more insulting than anything else; that Grant thinks he has the right to judge him like that; and Thomas isn’t sure what words are on the tip of his tongue, when there’s noise from the back passage and it’s Malini and Matthew, coming in.

“I’d better get on,” says Grant, as if sensing that he’d been on the verge of being asked to leave. “Good afternoon, Matt, Mal.”

Thomas just nods to them, hoping his feelings aren’t showing on his face; the last thing he wants to do is to let them get the idea he’s picking fights with senior command. That’s the definition of above their pay grade.

“Sir,” they chorus.

“Your boss has just been filling me in,” Grant goes on, carefully not specifying about what. “He runs you all a bit ragged, doesn’t he?”

“Sir,” Malini says again, the default response of a junior officer who can’t offer a contradiction but is, nevertheless, not entirely in agreement with the statement that has just been uttered.

“Why do you come over here just to give him a hard time?” Matthew says, like it’s a reflex he can’t help, and then stiffens when he realizes the words that have just come out of his own mouth. “Sir -”

Thomas is obliged, of course, to rescue him; or perhaps to rescue Grant from the disapproval he will otherwise be obliged to inflict, these things being what they are. “Matthew! I think you’ve forgotten to-”

“Right, yes sir, I’ll do that right away.” Matthew all but flees the scene. Malini eyes his exit nervously, mutters something about reports, and vanishes hastily into the library.

“Thanks,” Grant says once they’re out of earshot. “You know what nobody tells you until you get here, it’s exhausting keeping the lower ranks down, even when they go and make you do it.”

“You’ll have to excuse him,” Thomas says stiffly. “I made them do double practice this morning. They’re all quite tired.”

“You’re their guv.” Grant glances in the direction Matthew had vanished in, and then nods to Thomas, just once. “That’s the answer I was looking for.”

*

Grant might have expected that sort of response; Thomas hadn’t. Somewhere in the back of his head they’re still Grant’s apprentices, the ones he chose. A responsibility that went mostly one way, maybe. Part of him was thinking, he realizes, that he was training replacements, not – not this.

Part of him, maybe, wanted Tyburn to be right.

That’s such a horrific thought he clears up a whole week’s backlog of paperwork trying to avoid thinking it – even with half the Met not realising he exists, it’s so much easier to let it build up when so little of it is actual, physical paper anymore.

Abigail finds him on the upper floor of the coach house. It had been necessary to put the computer equipment in here, when he couldn’t avoid using it any longer, so that the protections around the Folly proper didn’t have to be touched. After Berwick Street, that had become a high priority. An even higher priority.

He wonders if he’s ever going to have to explain that responsibility to the apprentices, either one or all of them. Wonders if they’ll even have the context to understand it. The era that produced what he guards has faded almost out of living memory, at least the regular sort. Nazi Germany is a sort of casual shorthand for evil, storybook monsters. But there’s nothing storybook about the Black Library.

“Inspector,” Abigail says. Judging by the state of her hair, which is doing its best to escape its narrow restraints and imitate a thundercloud, it must still be damp out. “I heard Commander Grant was here today?”

“He was.”

“Can I…ask why?”

“You can,” says Thomas, and suppresses a smile when Abigail opens her mouth, narrows her eyes, and says “ _May_ I ask why?”

“Nothing to be worried about,” Thomas replies. “He had a couple of questions about some old cases. But I think that was mostly an excuse to find out how the four of you are getting on without saying so.”

“Sometimes I think he doesn’t like you very much,” Abigail says, throwing herself down on the chaise-longue with her elbows on her knees. “I don’t get why he decided to get involved with you – I mean, with this unit, with us…whatever. We’re not really his problem, he’s in Territorial.”

“I believe Commander Grant’s argument is that community engagement is a responsibility of all units, to one degree or another,” says Thomas. “To what extent that’s tongue-in-cheek I’m not quite sure.”

“I don’t think CO-19 care much about community engagement,” Abigail snorts.

“But other people have to care about it for them, or they’d have a much bigger problem.”

“Did you ask him to help find you people?”

None of them have asked that question before. Thomas wonders why.

“No,” he says honestly. “He offered.” No need to mention the extent to which pressure had been applied. There’s honesty and then there’s honesty. “I think he wants very much for the Folly to carry out its duties successfully. I’d sought permission to take on an apprentice in the past, and been turned down. He added some extra bureaucratic weight to it.”

“He told you we’re cousins, right?” Abigail looks at the floor when she says this, then looks up, her mouth set in stubborn lines.

“Naturally. He described the relationship as relatively distant, however.”

“It is,” says Abigail. “I think we’re – second cousins once removed? I dunno. We grew up on the same estate, so I saw him around, and his mum used to help with my hair and stuff when I was little, and then we were always hearing about it, you know, _you should be more like your cousin Peter, do you know he’s a Detective Inspector now._ ” She puts on a credible West African accent; Thomas never spent enough time there to have the ear for which country it might be from. “He’d come and talk to me at weddings and Christmas and things after I joined up, but it was weird, because he’d made superintendent by then. What I’m trying to say is. Sometimes he’s not very good at. Stuff.”

That’s a sharp curve; Thomas attempts to negotiate it unsuccessfully. “Stuff?”

“He’s better at people when he doesn’t like them,” Abigail explains, only compounding the issue. “I think ‘cause then it doesn’t matter. But if it does then – and he’s a ridiculous idealist, like, deep down, except it’s not very deep down really, but he really believes in, I don’t know, making a difference and things. I think that’s why he’s in charge of community engagement, because he really does believe in it.”

“Your point is…” says Thomas, who is both fascinated by this unprecedented outpouring of information about a relationship he’d thought Abigail had resolved not to mention, and not quite sure where she intends to go with it.

Abigail straightens up. “He wouldn’t come over here and ask about us and give you a hard time, or whatever Matt was saying, if he didn’t like you. He’d just give you enough rope to hang yourself with.”

“I think whether he likes me or not is rather beside the point, don’t you?” Grant does not at all strike Thomas as the kind of person who lets questions of _liking_ , and god only knows how Abigail means the phrase because he’s not going to ask her, interfere with doing the right thing. Or at least what Grant believes to be the right thing. He doesn’t think back to dinner.

“Right,” says Abigail. “Yeah. Sorry.” She hesitates, and Thomas waits, but she doesn’t say anything.

He turns back to his paperwork.

The vexing thing is that Thomas is quite certain, despite what Abigail might claim, despite one evening of sociability, that Grant _doesn’t_ actually like him all that much. He’s deeply curious about magic, certainly, and quite sincere about his desire to increase the Met’s involvement with the demi-monde, but he puts up with Thomas because Thomas is all he has to work with. Everything about who Thomas is – his birth, his schooling, his career –– seems to be a strike against him, as far as Grant is concerned. There’s a certain layer of irony to everything he says, a certain look in his eyes when he watches Thomas, like he’s expecting to be disappointed at some stage and only waiting to find out when. He’s not sure how anyone could mistake that for anything else.

It might be deliberate; it might be intended to make Thomas rise to the occasion. If so, Grant hasn’t read Thomas well at all, because it mostly inspires a perverse desire to live down to expectations; the only thing holding him back is his sense of duty. Some days it feels like that’s all he’s got left. 

*

Everything goes quiet for a while after that, aside from the sort of small call-outs that usually punctuate Thomas’s quiet periods - although they’re much less punctuated now he doesn’t have to personally attend every one. The apprentices fail to enliven the new routine in any particularly troublesome ways, aside from the odd exploded apple and Annie falling into the River Lea, but it’s spring and she can swim so the only real injury is to her pride (and also, very slightly, the Folly’s reputation with Lea.)

They’ve established a rota to answer the phone in the off-hours without Thomas even having to either suggest it or make adjustments for fairness, which he feels bodes very well. This is why, when a call comes from Belgravia regarding a murder inquiry, Thomas doesn’t hear anything about it until breakfast, when Molly presents him with a note.

“Did Mal not set her alarm?” asks Matthew, looking around; Malini is usually very quick off the mark, breakfast-wise.

“She’s been called out by the Murder Squad,” says Thomas. “Something about…” he squints; Malini’s handwriting is somewhat indecipherable. She has claimed this is cited by her father as evidence she should have attended medical school. Thomas isn’t sure this is an explanation, as such. “…an alley?”

“Let me,” says Annie, whose mother is a doctor. “Body in an alley in Soho, DCI May thinks it’s us, will call. But she doesn’t say what time that was.”

“It was about four, I think?” says Abigail. “Molly read the rota wrong and woke me up first.”

“Did she do the thing where she just sort of…” Matthew waves a hand.

“Yes,” says Abigail. Molly appears in the doorway as if out of nowhere. “Juuuuuust like that.”

Molly raises an eyebrow, and comes in to proffer up a fresh batch of toast. Thomas only gets a piece because Annie hesitates. He’d forgotten somehow just how well-trained junior constables tend to be at taking advantage of any food in their general vicinity.

Also, Molly put the toast in front of Abigail, quite possibly as a sort of vague apology for waking her up when it was Malini’s turn, but then again possibly not. Molly isn’t much for apologies.

Malini calls just after breakfast; Abigail’s already left, having a prior appointment with Beverley Brook. She’s taken Abigail under her wing somewhat and Thomas is tentatively hopeful it will prove useful.

“I thought about texting, but this seemed easier,” says Malini. “I think DCI May was right, sir, it’s one of ours.”

“In what way?”

“Uh,” Malini says. “You haven’t mentioned, but, uh, werecreatures? Do we do that?”

“Not that I’ve ever seen solid evidence for,” Thomas says, the werewolves of the war probably being a legend, and then he thinks of something else it could be, and he tenses. “Tell me why you think that.”

The victim, it emerges, was mauled to death - “I can describe it if you like but it might not sit well with breakfast, sir” - in an alleyway. CCTV footage is being chased down, but there doesn’t appear to have been a camera pointed at the precise spot.

“There never is,” Thomas mutters sourly. “Go on, constable.”

“There’s probably some of the murderer leaving, though, they’re still working through it,” Malini reassures him. “The thing is, the pathologist thinks - it’s gone to Dr Walid but he’s still working on it - the assailant was ah, uh, man-sized large cat. But there’s blood, and footprints, and…I don’t think large cats normally wear size eleven trainers.”

“What about the _vestigia_ ,” Thomas has to prompt her. “At the scene.”

“Tricky,” Malini says. “I mean, death? And pain. And definitely a big cat. But nothing that tells me anything I don’t already know. Or it does but I’m not getting it. Forensics are still going, so if you want to…”

“No,” Thomas says. It’s been a few months; Malini isn’t the best at sensing _vestigia_ of the four but she knows what she’s about. “Do we have an identity for the victim?”

“Charles Bredon, age forty-three. Wallet was in a bin a block over. No cash, so it was dumped. One or two contactless cards might be missing, which would be good for us if they’re used. The official working theory is a mugging.”

“It’s a possibility, certainly. Magic doesn’t stop people being poor, or desperate, or lazy, or cruel.”

“You think our victim was mugged by a _weretiger_?” Malini’s voice rises with scepticism. “Shit. Sorry sir, I think DCI May just overheard me say that.”

“I don’t,” says Nightingale. “I think it may have been a chimera.”

“What’s a chimera?”

“If you survive DCI May,” says Thomas, “meet me at the mortuary and I’ll tell you.”

As he puts the phone down, he can hear the others in the background.

“…or a human that’s a genetic mosaic,” Annie is saying. “But you don’t need magic for that.”

“Magical genetic engineering?” asks Matthew. “I mean, there’s science to it, right? With that great big statue of Newton in the front hall and all.”

“Oh, let’s just ask. What’s a chimera, sir?” Annie addresses him. “Do we need to know about it?”

“I would have hoped not,” Thomas tells them all. “But apparently you do.”

The other theory Malini had chosen not to mention to him on the phone was that Bredon might have been attempting to purchase sexual services, that alley being known for it; if there are witnesses of that stripe, though, they won’t be coming forward. Thomas recalls the club, what they’d found, and thinks that certainly a possibility, though one that has no bearing on their end of the case past providing a reason for a management consultant to be mugged and then murdered in an alley.

“If you’re rich, can’t you pay sex workers to come to you? Who wants to get off in the cold?” muses Malini aloud as they stare at the corpse.

Sometimes Thomas feels like he’s adapted to the world’s changes perfectly well and then he has a WPC come out with something like that. He tries not to take note. She wouldn’t appreciate it.

“Well, if that was what he was looking for, he didn’t get it,” says Abdul. “But he did get rather a lot of biological material under his fingernails, as well as a nice dusting of hair. It’s astonishing how they shed, cats.”

“A chimera,” Thomas says grimly.

“Can’t say for certain until I’ve had a chance to run this through the sequencer. So give me until this afternoon.”

“Does it take that long?” Malini wants to know.

“When I started helping out your governor, it took six months,” Abdul tells her dryly, “so I’d adjust your expectations.”

Malini wrinkles her nose. “I never did biology at school.”

“Oh, good, you and Thomas can sympathise over your mutual ignorance,” Abdul says blithely. “He’s no good at it either.”

“Malini,” Thomas says. “You’re sticking with the Murder Team for the duration; try not to antagonise Lesley May too much if you can avoid it.”

“She thinks saying ‘magic’ out loud is antagonistic,” Malini not-quite-complains.

“Then you already have a fair idea of the constraints you’ll be working under.”

“Sir,” Malini says, not unhappily. “Is there anything in particular you want me to do?”

“Whatever you’re told, and if you think you’re getting into a confrontation, _call_ me,” Thomas says. “The rest of us are going to be chasing up leads on our end of things.”

“If there’s a chimera,” Abdul says, washing his hands, “does that mean there’s a magician?”

“I certainly hope not,” says Thomas, and because Malini is there, doesn’t complete the sentence: _my reputation with the Met barely survived the last one._

*

The first Thomas hears of it is a call from May’s sergeant.

“Inspector Nightingale?” he says. “DCI May asked me to call you, she’s sorry she couldn’t but she’s still dealing with the scene – Constable Choudhury’s in hospital.” The first thing Malini would have done is called him herself, Thomas is pretty sure; he’s surprised at how the news makes his gut clench.

“Where?”

“UCH,” he’s told. “She’s alright – she needs a bunch of stitches but she’s not in danger. Oh, I almost forgot, she asked me to say she fried her phone.”

That’s a better explanation. Thomas thanks May’s sergeant and hangs up; no question of where he needs to go next.

He doesn’t get two steps before Abigail finds him. “Sir, uh, there’s something you need to see on the news.”

_Large cat on the loose in central London?_ reads the scrolling headline; Thomas rubs his face.

“You don’t have to watch the whole thing but it says an officer was injured,” says Abigail. “Mal?”

“At UCH; I’m told she’s not seriously injured but she destroyed her phone.”

“Good,” Abigail says. “I mean, not good, ‘cause she’s hurt, but good it isn’t worse. Is she going to have to be there overnight? Do I need to get her stuff or anything?”

“I don’t know at this stage,” Thomas tells her. “I’ll let you know if that’s the case. For now I need you to get in touch with May’s sergeant and offer yourself up as a replacement. We need somebody who knows about our end of things and isn’t stuck in a hospital bed.”

There’s no point taking the Jag through midday traffic for a walk of little over half a mile, so Thomas sets out on foot. The other thing this allows him to do is call Lesley May. He’s known her long enough to know that hearing from her sergeant was probably primarily because she didn’t want to talk to him. His apprentice has been injured; she has to do better than that.

“Ugh, it’s you,” is her response. “She’s going to be fine. Just some scratches and a bite. Nothing near vital organs or anything like that.”

“As pleased as I am to hear that,” which Thomas is, although scratches and a bite from a chimera is likely worse than it sounds, “what happened?”

“What do you think happened?” May sounds irritated, but that’s a normal state of affairs. “We got a lead, your constable insisted on going in first, the suspect declined to be taken into custody, nobody got a Taser out in time and he got away. He went down a manhole, so we’re talking to Thames Water and the BTP in case he connects up with the Underground somehow, but we’re back at square one again.”

“This lead,” Thomas says. “That would be the one Inspector Kumar provided to us?”

May takes his point semi-graciously. “Yes, it would. But now we need one all over again.” She pauses. “Thomas, what the fuck was that thing?”

“It used to be a human, probably,” says Thomas.

“And then what?”

“Some rather black magic.”

“Oh my god,” says May. “Say that in front of Peter. Please. Just for me. Get one of your constables to record it.”

“What?”

May sighs. “Oh, never mind. Whatever; I don’t want to know about the mumbo-jumbo part. What I mean is, are we talking someone I can arrest? A – person? Or is this some sort of-”

Well, isn’t that a question. “I can’t be sure without talking to it. Or him, or her, I suppose. Make an arrest and then see what you get.” He’s nearly to the hospital. “Look, I need to go.”

“By all means,” says May. “It’s not like I haven’t just taken ten minutes out of a nightmarishly busy day to answer your questions.”

“Thank you, Lesley,” says Thomas, because courtesy costs nothing. “I appreciate it. I’m sure you understand my concern – you have your own junior officers.”

“Well, they’re not that stupid,” May grumbles. “Oh, fine, that’s not fair – she was doing all the right things, you can’t predict fucking human idiocy. If it is human idiocy. But since she’s down, you’d better spot me one of the others – thank god you got spares.”

An argument about her use of the term ‘spares’ is probably what she’s angling for, so Thomas declines to have it. “I’ve already asked Abigail to contact you. And now I really do have to-”

“Go, go, reassure yourself she’s not bleeding to death,” May says. “I’ll be in touch. Try not to make this worse. Or let any of your apprentices do that, either. There’s some weird pressure coming from upstairs over this case and I don’t know why. If you do, sort it out. I don’t need the hassle.”

“A pleasure as always, Lesley,” says Thomas.

“Good-bye.” May hangs up. Thomas almost misses Seawoll, who finally retired and stopped being Thomas’s main point of contact with the Murder Team five years ago, and Stephanopoulos, who transferred out of London when her wife’s job moved. May is as prickly as both of them combined where he’s concerned and has never really trusted him to get on with his job, which Seawoll – sometimes – had. Then again, she would have heard rumours about Berwick Street as a constable, if not dealt directly with some of the fallout. It is, perhaps, unsurprising.

He finds Abdul first; it’s the quickest way to find out where Mal is.

“You were quick,” Abdul says. “She’s in no danger, if you were thinking so. Well drugged up, so I wouldn’t expect much sense out of her, either.”

“What’s the prognosis?”

“A few days off her feet, probably a week or two on crutches. There’s some damage to the muscle tissue which will take time to heal, physiotherapy and all the rest of it. Medical leave, certainly, for the time being. You’re going to have to do some thinking about how she’ll get around the place – the Folly’s not exactly friendly to the less than fully fit, all those stairs and no lift.”

Thomas hadn’t thought of that; he hasn’t taken an injury which has left him off his feet since the war, and before you went elsewhere to convalesce. “I’ll have to think about it, and speak with Molly. Which room is she in?”

“I’ll get someone to show you, I’ve got a class in five minutes,” says Abdul, “but unless you’re quick you won’t be her first visitor, I should warn you; I just sent him on up.”

“Who?” Her parents are in Manchester, Thomas knows there are siblings but doesn’t think any of them are in London. A colleague from before she moved to the Folly, maybe?

“Your friend Commander Grant,” says Abdul.

*

Grant‘s presence at the hospital causes Thomas some minor feelings of outrage: _surely_ he has better things to be doing?

“Of course I have better things to be doing,” Grant agrees, insouciantly, when Thomas catches up to him just outside Mal’s room. “But one of the really fantastic things about getting to this stage in my career is that I get to let a certain amount of whim direct my priorities.” His voice lowers, gets more serious. “Also, I strong-armed you into taking them on. That makes them my responsibility, too. I _told_ you that.”

Thomas blinks at that, realizes his mouth is curving involuntarily upwards. “I suppose it does.”

“Huh,” says Grant.

“What is it?”

“Tell you later.” He nods into the room. “Before I go in – how is she?”

“Drugged to the gills, I’m told, which is for the best at this stage,” Thomas says. “Abdul says she’ll be all right, if there’s no infection. Apparently that’s more of a problem these days than it used to be. I thought they’d fixed that.”

“Antibiotic resistance.” Grant makes a face. “Everything old is new again, including dying from _Staphylococcus aureus_ in your wounds. And bites from humans are supposed to be the worst you can get, for infections.”

Thomas makes a point of not knowing the names of diseases, as it generally only serves to make one more worried than necessary, but he gets the gist. “It wasn’t…a human bite, exactly.”

“No, I bet our friend doesn’t brush his teeth twice a day, so it might be worse,” says Grant. “You’re going to explain to me how this whole thing is possible later, I hope you realise.”

“It’s the blackest of magic,” Thomas says, and realises his mistake when Grant looks at him. And looks at him. And raises an eyebrow. At least Lesley May isn’t here. “That really is what we – _very unethical_ magic, if you prefer.”

“I just think it could lead to confusion,” Grant says in the mildest of tones, but he inclines his head very slightly. “Especially for Abigail. Alright, let me have a couple of words with Mal, then I’ll get out of here and let you all get on with things. The gory details can wait.”

Mal is only half-awake; Thomas remembers all too well what opiate painkillers do to your mental state. “Commander Grant, sir?”

“Just wanted to check you really were in one piece,” Grant says. “And that you’d been sufficiently supplied with grapes. Better get somebody to guard them – last time I was in hospital one of my mates ate all of mine.”

“Don’t really like grapes,” Mal confides.

“Never mind, then. You did a good job, Constable. Your governor’s pleased with you, and so is DCI May, and so am I.”

“Thank you, sir.”

There’s a knock on the door; an officer, but not one Thomas knows. “Commander Grant, sir, you said to come and fetch you -”

“Right, yes,” Grant says. “Parked up outside? I’ll be down in a minute, two if I’m unlucky with the lift. Thank you, sergeant.”

He nods to Mal. “Rest up while you’re healing, alright? No chasing anybody until you get medical clearance, and pay attention to what Inspector Nightingale tells you about magic, too.”

“Definitely no magic practice until you’re out of the hospital,” Thomas adds.

“What was it?” Thomas asks as Grant’s leaving, following him just out of the room. “The thing you were going to tell me later.”

Grant _hmms_. “Did you know you haven’t called me sir for three weeks now? Even when you’re annoyed with me.”

“My apologies, sir,” Thomas says as blandly as possible. There’s a moment when everything feels…not better, he still has an apprentice who won’t be walking for a week and has a lot of morphine in her system, but comfortable. Grant looks up and down the corridor, steps in close, and says “I’ll see you later.”

He’s close enough for Thomas to notice the fine beads of water on the collar of his coat; it’s been damp out on and off all day, no surprises there. It’s disconcerting, somehow.

“Right, yes, certainly,” Thomas says. “Sir.”

All in all, Thomas thinks he still won that round, apart from the way Grant walked off smirking, but it’s a close-run thing. He goes back in to say goodbye to Mal; he’ll get Abigail to pop around a little later in the afternoon, bring more of her things.

She seems reasonably coherent now, which is promising. “Why did Commander Grant come to see me? I’m not _that_ hurt.” Untrue, but probably good she believes it.

“I think he feels somewhat responsible for all of you, since he persuaded you to join the Folly,” Thomas tells her.

“Oh, that makes sense. It would be weird if it was just because he likes you.” She follows this up by falling asleep again, so he can’t even give her a look.

Thomas takes it back: she’s not coherent at all. Better make sure one of Abdul’s students keeps an extra-close eye on her.

*

Despite everybody’s best efforts, the case goes cold after that. No sightings, no information received from sources mundane or otherwise, even when Thomas gets the apprentices to talk to the various contacts they’ve made and approaches Beverley Brook himself.

“Why should we help you find him?” she asks bluntly. “What happens then?”

“In all likelihood, he killed somebody,” Thomas says. “Do you think he shouldn’t answer to justice?”

“I don’t think you can give him justice,” says Beverley. “What are you going to do, put him up in court? Come on. We all know what sort of justice you hand out in the end.”

Thomas tries not to let that hurt. He wants to protest, but explanations, excuses – they’re not going to get anywhere.

“On my power,” he says instead. “We’re looking to make an arrest. And to find out, if we can, what happened and why, whether there were mitigating circumstances. There could be.”

“Half my sisters would tell me to tell you to go to hell,” Beverley says. “The other half would tell me to do it more subtly.”

“And your mother?”

“Knows who you are.” Which isn’t an answer. Then she changes the topic. “These apprentices of yours.”

“You don’t like them?”

“It doesn’t feel like you,” says Beverley. “If you’d asked me, I know the sort of person you’d pick, and none of them are that. It feels like somebody else.”

“What sort of person do you think I would have picked, on my own?”

That’s a partial admission and she catches it, but all she says is “Somebody like you. Not posh – I mean, that too, but not just that. You’re very…methodical. One or two of them are like that. But not all of them.”

“I hardly think myself the Platonic ideal of a police officer,” says Thomas. “A range of skill sets is useful.”

“Hmph,” she says, and changes the topic back. “Look, we don’t want anybody running around biting people either, but you think he’d show up where we’re likely to notice? Sorry. I don’t have anything. I’ll…consider passing it on, if I do hear something.” She eyes him thoughtfully. “You know, this time last year you wouldn’t have come to me to ask that. You’d have waited for me to come to you, and been waiting forever.”

Thomas doesn’t know what to say to that, even though it’s true.

Inspector Kumar of the BTP digs up some CCTV footage from the Underground, which is promptly excised from the public record - they don’t need _that_ floating around the Internet. It doesn’t tell them anything particularly useful, though, except that the presumed perpetrator (or another chimera, please let there not be two) was outside Tottenham Court Road station. There’s been more than one sighting in the area; the question is if he’s still around there.

Something comes up from the other end, though, when Annie comes to Thomas a few days after his conversation with Beverley Brook.

“I’ve got something,” she says. “Actually, you should have - I mean, the thing is, sir, you interviewed the victim, twelve years ago.”

“Wait - are you sure?” Thomas racks his brain, doesn’t remember interviewing a Charles Bredon over anything that happened that year.

“I’m absolutely sure,” Annie says. “I didn’t notice it the first time I went through HOLMES because there’s nothing else attached – no interview notes or statement. And nobody else did because it wasn’t listed as in connection with a specific case; it was just a piece of data floating around the system. But you did.”

The nagging sense of familiarity that’s been lurking ever since they got this case resolves itself suddenly. The picture it paints sends prickles of unease marching up Thomas’s spine.

“Tell me again what we know about him,” he says. “From the beginning.”

He’s pretty sure he knows what’s coming, but it’s when Annie gets to _Oxford_ and _dining club_ that he’s certain. He stands up.

“Sir?” Annie asks.

“I did interview him, you’re absolutely right,” he says. “And there are notes, but they aren’t in HOLMES.”

“Why on earth not?”

“Security,” Thomas says, grimly, and goes to fetch his case folder on the Little Crocodiles.

After the man in the mask – Wheatcroft’s student – and the slow, painful recovery, the damage to his credibility with the Met, with the Rivers, with just about anybody you cared to name, except perhaps Molly, Thomas had painstakingly checked every man, and the few women, who could be linked to Wheatcroft and his group. It would have been much easier with some sort of straightforward test for practitioners – the Rivers could smell them, or so they claimed – but they considered the Little Crocodiles his problem, not theirs. So he’d had to investigate them the mundane and difficult way.

(Easier, too, with an apprentice, but there was no way the Commissioner would have agreed to that, after Berwick Street. Thomas wonders that Grant had managed to overcome that reluctance, but of course this Commissioner is not the old one, and time has passed. Ten years, no, closer to fifteen. These things fade from people’s minds, eventually.)

He hadn’t found anybody else he considered a credible threat. Given from whence they had sprung, outright accusations, let alone interrogations, weren’t possible, even with the events that had sent him after them. Some had claimed not to remember, some had claimed to not believe in magic. Some of those he even believed. It would be all-too-easy to rewrite, in retrospect, memories twenty or thirty years old. It was astonishing what people could forget having seen, if they chose to.

None had had any evidence of active practice in their homes or offices, when he’d managed to access them. It had been a dead end, and as the years had gone on and no new magician had emerged – and he did fancy he had a better chance of knowing that now than before – he’d stopped worrying about it quite so much.

So maybe it wasn’t anything; maybe their victim was genuinely unlucky. Maybe the fact that he’d certainly known this chimera’s creator – if that was the right word – decades before was the sort of improbable coincidence the world threw up now and again to make the lives of hard-working police investigators that little bit more difficult.

Thomas doesn’t think he’s ever been that lucky.

He calls everybody together; this is the sort of information that can’t and shouldn’t be held from them.

“But you don’t think the victim was a magician,” says Abigail.

“In retrospect I can’t be certain.”

“The Rivers could tell,” says Matthew, unexpectedly. “Or that’s what Brent said.”

“But that’s _vestigia_ , isn’t it?” says Annie. “Just we can’t sense our own. Or it’s something like _vestigia_. Could they do it with a corpse?”

“If any of you think you can persuade one of the Rivers to visit the mortuary, you’re more than welcome to try,” says Thomas, “but I wouldn’t hold out much hope.”

“What’s the difference between a magician and a wizard, anyway?” Annie wants to know.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Mal shoots back. She’s out of hospital but on crutches and unhappy about it; Abdul was right, the Folly really isn’t designed for that sort of thing.

“Magician was - is, I suppose - considered mildly pejorative,” Thomas explains, for the sake of moving the conversation along. “Because of the overlap with stage performers. If you’re done with vocabulary for the day…”

They murmur apologies, try to look attentive.

“If there’s a connection,” he says, “it could be with anybody from that group. So we’re going to need to track them all down again. _None_ of you are to try any interviews or anything like that on your own, do you understand?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” says Mal, and waves a crutch.

“Any of you,” he says again. “Not with another officer, either, even a senior one. Only with me.”

“You said you had to fight this - magician,” says Matthew. “Was it - was he that good?”

“I could have died,” Thomas says, blunt to drive the message home. Eyes widen, all around; he likes to think they have some sense of his competence. “Does that explain it?”

“Well, what can we do, then?” Abigail wants to know.

“The other ninety percent of police work,” says Thomas. “Research.”

*

Grant calls to check in on him a few days after that. “I’ve bothered Lesley already, and she chewed my ear off, which means it’s going poorly. Jaget - Kumar - said he has an idea but it’s not strong enough yet to pass on to you. How’s it looking from your end?”

“Nothing,” Thomas says. “We’re quite certain of the culprit, the problem is he’s vanished.” He doesn’t mention anything about the Little Crocodiles or Bredon’s connections, his suspicions there; he needs to be sure before he pulls that out. “I wish I had something else. Truth be told I’d rather not talk about it any more.” He’s already fielded calls from his own direct chain of command, insomuch as it exists; this case is reflecting poorly on both the Murder Team and the Folly.

“Fair enough,” says Grant. “Want to talk about something else instead?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Let me get you dinner and we can figure it out.”

“Oh,” says Thomas. That sounds like a terrible idea in every sense. “Alright. Tonight?”

“Right,” says Grant. “Great. Yes. Okay.”

They make plans, and Thomas stares at his phone, once he’s hung up, like it’s betrayed him.

They go for Indian. Thomas is not specific with the apprentices about where he’s going. He’s not sure why.

“Lesley likes to say I’m self-sabotaging,” Grant says, apropos of nothing, while they’re waiting for their food to arrive. “At anything involving – getting to know people.”

“Lesley – May?”

“Mmmm,” Grant says. “You have no reason to know this, but I had a massive thing for her when we were probationers.”

“And she was very nice about it?”

“Have you _met_ Lesley?”

Thomas lets himself grin. “She was very not-nice about it?”

“Actually she was incredibly good-humoured, considering,” Grant concedes. “But she takes a very dim view of my interpersonal skills to this day.”

Nobody like Grant gets to be where he’s got to without fairly extensive interpersonal skills, Thomas is quite aware, so he must assume any failings are limited strictly to the personal sphere.

“The apprentices,” Thomas says, “are rather under the impression you don’t like me much at all.”

“And yet,” Grant says, “here we are.”

“In my experience they’re not incompatible.”

“I said self-sabotaging, not masochistic.” 

“I think that’s a bit much information this early in the evening, don’t you?”

Grant flushes along his cheekbones and the tips of his ears and takes a swig of beer like it’s going to cover it up, but he’s smiling when he puts the glass down. “Touché.”

Thomas realizes he likes flustering Grant a bit too much.

“I think you’d grit your teeth and try to placate me, though,” Thomas goes on, “if you thought it was going to reintegrate me into the greater Met any faster.”

“I think you severely overestimate my Machiavellian tendencies.”

“Tyburn likes you too much for you to not have some.”

“I didn’t say by how much.”

They’re perhaps fortunately interrupted by the food arriving; the conversation turns to less fraught topics, like Grant’s opinions on the Folly’s architecture, which are surprisingly detailed (“I arrested an architect once,” he says, deadpan, and laughs at Thomas’s expression. “Tell you another time.”) Thomas unwinds enough, not just because of his second beer, to talk about some of the time he spent travelling in the thirties – Grant asks sideways questions about the period, lets Thomas skim over some of the details. It’s surprisingly – nice.

It’s not that late when they’re finished eating; the longest day is fast approaching, and there’s still light in the sky. Thomas remembers what he said earlier, _it’s a little early in the evening_ , and considers how to make his goodbyes. It’s the only sensible thing. The trouble is making himself want to.

“I suppose you’d better be getting back,” Grant says.

“I probably should.” After all, and it faintly amuses Thomas that it’s taken him this long to think of it, there’s always the possibility that Grant merely thinks they’re establishing a friendship, that the awkwardness Thomas feels, the tension, is entirely his own - 

“Or,” Grant says slowly. “We’re not that far from mine. I got this espresso machine last year, according to Jaget I’m not totally incompetent with it.”

Thomas tries to parse this, hopes he’s got it right. “I…could do with a coffee.”

“Good.” Grant relaxes. Thomas hadn’t seen the tension in him until it melted away. “Me too.”

You learn a lot about someone from their home, and Thomas wonders what he’ll learn about Grant. The trouble, of course, is that the instincts you learn from policing are at best somewhat intrusive; Thomas has to actively work, for example, against scanning the bookshelves in Grant’s open-plan living room and kitchen. There’s a great deal of non-fiction, a solid bulwark of history, particularly pertaining to London, and a long array of crack-spined paperbacks with the faded silver and gilt that tends to demarcate science fiction and the like.

“Don’t read _too_ much into those,” Grant says, nodding from where he’s doing something mysterious to the aforementioned espresso machine; Thomas realizes he’s lost the battle against not looking. “I bought a lot of stuff secondhand when I was younger, and then I pretty much switched to e-books once I could afford to buy new. Dunno why I’ve carted that lot around, really. I don’t suppose much of the Folly’s collection is available for Kindle.”

“You can’t replace books with devices,” Thomas says. “Especially not when you’re prone to destroying electronics by accident. Although I can envision the merits of a, what do you call it, _search index_.”

“You should ask Davis up at Oxford or one of his assistants about getting things scanned, he’d be dead keen,” Grant tells him. “In the meantime, you’ve got manpower to make up the gap. Or mostly womanpower; please don’t tell Abigail I said that. She held me up once when she was fifteen as an example of not using sexist language and I’ve lived in fear of disappointing her ever since. Don’t tell her that, either.”

“My lips are sealed,” Thomas assures him. “How do you know how Davis feels about that?”

“We talk,” Grant says. “On Twitter.”

Thomas still has only the haziest of ideas what _Twitter_ encompasses, apart from being some sort of very public telegraph system, and feels this is not the moment to confess it.  He accepts a very small – and when he tastes it, very strong –– cup of espresso, as his excuse to avoid furthering that line of inquiry.

“Oh, oops,” Grant says, the moment his lips touch the cup. “I forgot. Uh, no obligation? The coffee is free?”

Thomas very nearly spoils all Grant’s efforts by choking. “I, ah. I appreciate the spirit, but that’s probably not necessary.””

“Why, because I…can’t do magic?”

“Essentially.” Thomas takes a deliberate sip. “But – I do appreciate the intent.”

He looks for somewhere to sit down; the sofa doesn’t look promising. 

“Yeah, I know,” Grant says, when Thomas eyes it. “It’s needed replacing for about two years. My mother lectures me every time she comes over. I strongly suggest you take the armchair.”

Thomas stays where he is, in the kitchen. Grant doesn’t make any move to sit, either. There’s a sort of crackling tension in the air Thomas associates primarily with the moments before a magical duel, and isn’t _that_ an indictment on how long it’s been since he did anything like this.

“Inspector Kumar was right,” Thomas says, putting down his cup. “You’re not totally incompetent. With the coffee.”

“I think I asked for that,” Grant says.

Thomas has never been good at waiting, his patience hard-won over the years, so he shifts closer, past the line of deniability, plucks the cup out of Grant’s hand and puts it down, rests his other hand on the line of Grant’s jaw. He’s wanted to do that for – months. Grant’s mouth quirks, and he reaches out to lay a hand hot at Thomas’s waist, but apart from that he stays still, lets Thomas lean in and kiss the smile off his face. He tastes of coffee, mostly, obviously, a little of the hair-raisingly spicy vindaloo he’d ordered for dinner. He’s so, so warm.

Grant kisses like he’s trying to make a point, curls his fingers hard around Thomas’s arm, the back of his neck. Thomas is rather far from minding, crowds Grant shamelessly up against the edge of the kitchen bench. He’s alright with not thinking for a while.

“Fuck,” Grant says, after they’ve meandered to a natural pause, resting his forehead against Thomas’s. “I didn’t actually mean to - I mean I don’t - I don’t know what I mean.”

He hasn’t pulled away and he’s still got a hand firmly centred in the small of Thomas’s back; Thomas doesn’t want to talk about this, wants to take him to bed and keep not talking about it, see how long they can spin out this unprecedented moment of total agreement.

“Then what did you mean to do?” Thomas asks, a thread of irritation working its way in; he wants to either do this or not.

Grant does lean back a little, lets his hands drop, if slowly. “This is incredibly inappropriate and I should probably report myself to HR.” It comes out more like a question.

“And yet I suspect you’re not going to do that.”

“I mean it, though,” Grant insists. “Even if you’re not in my chain of command -”

“You’re right.” That actually stops him and Thomas presses on. “It is incredibly inappropriate; I’m three times your age.”

He doesn’t make any move to pull away himself; an inch or two already feels like a gulf.

“And yet,” Grant says, “here we are.”

“I should go,” Thomas says. He should have gone home after dinner.

“I’m not kicking you out,” Grant says. “I just - I like my ill-considered workplace relationships with a certain degree of consideration, as paradoxical as that sounds when I say it out loud.”

“The last time I had an ill-considered workplace relationship it was punishable by imprisonment and hard labour,” says Thomas, because it’s true.

Grant actually laughs. “God, okay, that put things in perspective.”

It’s enough for Thomas to take a deep breath and step back himself. “Maybe. Another time?”

“Yeah,” Grant breathes, startlingly open for a second, tongue swiping his lower lip. “Look, everything’s still - I know I’ve been stirring the pot with your unit, and this is a terrible time to. Introduce any other confounding factors. No matter how much I’d - oh, God, I’m just going to stop talking.”

“Well,” Thomas says. “You’re not wrong.”

He wonders if this is just the _self-sabotaging_ thing Grant mentioned earlier in the evening, remembers what Abigail had said, _he’s better at people when he doesn’t like them_. Doesn’t make it any less confusing.

“Right.”

They stare at each other. There’s still colour in Grant’s cheeks, very faintly visible; he’s darker with the summer, must make some effort to get outside. Thomas wonders what they’re doing.

“I should be going,” he says aloud. Again.

“Yeah.” Grant is still staring at his mouth. “Please; for the record, I’ve pretty much exhausted my better judgement for the evening.”

“Mine too,” Thomas says, but he walks away anyway, manages to not look back as he closes the door behind him. He never even took his coat off. He supposes he always knew this was a bad idea.

He doesn’t remember most of the walk back to the Folly, too lost in his own thoughts. Molly appears when he comes in the back entrance, silent and very curious. The apprentices, thank God, appear to all be well asleep, or at least quietly in their rooms. Molly looks him up and down, taking in, he’s quite sure, every hair out of place and every wrinkle in his clothing.

“Not a word,” Thomas tells her. “Not one.”


	3. Respect and Cooperation

Abdul calls the next morning, when Thomas is still unsure if he’s in a good mood or not, to say he’s gotten a match on the DNA from Mal and Bredon’s assailant.

“Two matches, actually,” he says. “But one of them is to a Javan tiger, which isn’t very useful. Unless you wanted to track down whoever created the chimera, which…”

“…is almost certainly unnecessary, because it was our faceless friend,” Thomas sighs. Sometimes he regrets the outcome of that particular fight. Sometimes. “What about the other?”

The other is to a criminal record, which Thomas has Annie hunt down and print out for him. Jacob Miller, now in his mid-thirties, born in Birmingham, notable only - if you can call him notable at all - for a string of arrests in his late teens and early twenties, petty stuff for the most part, small-time burglaries and disturbing the peace. The photograph is of a perfectly ordinary young white man, brown hair and brown eyes, a sullen expression and an unfortunate set of ears. The important thing for their purposes is that Miller drops off the radar entirely between twenty and fifteen years ago. No arrests, no convictions, nothing else either when Annie finishes running the rest of the searches - no NHS records, no welfare applications, no births or marriages or even a death certificate. Nothing. But then, Thomas considers, the difficulties of interacting with bureaucracy are somewhat increased when you look like a tiger.

He shows the photograph to Mal, who is propped up on an armchair in the Reading Room doing Latin exercises diligently. Thomas can’t fault her work ethic.

“Uh,” she says. “Nope, sorry, no resemblance. But with the…fur…and the ears…and the fangs, and everything…it’d be hard to tell, you know?”

“All tiger people look the same?” suggests Matthew innocently, from one armchair over. Mal narrows her eyes at him for a split-second, then laughs. “Basically, I reckon.”

“Can I see, sir?” asks Abigail, coming into the room. “Huh. Doesn’t look that interesting. Wonder what made him volunteer.”

“He may not have,” Thomas says. “Given the person we believe effected his…transformation.”

“D’you think he was a furry?” Mal wonders aloud. Matthew goggles at her in horror and tries to hide behind Pliny; Thomas looks over just in time to see Abigail making frantic _cut it off_ motions with her hands.

“I don’t think his sexual fetishes are likely to be of particular relevance to the case at hand,” he says, because clearly they all assume he has no idea what the term means, or at least they don’t want to know if he does.

There’s a peculiar choking noise from the doorway; it is, of course, Annie.

“Uh, do I _want_ the context for this conversation?” she asks.

“No!” says Matthew.

“You’re right, sir, not relevant,” Mal says to Thomas; she’s too dark to blush, which is probably lucky for her right now. “Sorry.”

“We were trying to figure out why someone would volunteer to get made into a tiger,” Abigail tells Annie prosaically.

“Oh? _Oh_ ,” Annie says, and Thomas wonders what the world is coming to, but only in a very vague way. Matthew is still rather red, poor lad.

“This is great, though,” Abigail goes on. “A name means we can find his family and associates, and that means we can find out how he’s thinking, and that means we might actually _find_ him.”

“Since you’re so excited about the prospect, please feel free to start.” Thomas hands her the folder.

*

Abigail doesn’t find anything quickly. Miller’s recorded friends and family haven’t seen him for years; most say they assumed he was dead, some petty crime gone wrong and the body not identified. Of course, given what’s happened to him, he might as well be, Thomas thinks. Likely if he’d wanted to speak with his family in the intervening years, he would have.

Their interviews with Bredon’s friends and family - and the quieter, slower work on the rest of the Little Crocodiles - haven’t provided anything either. Apparently he was thinking of starting some new consultancy business with another Oxford friend, but that one is conveniently out of the country, a business trip to the United States. He’s not on Thomas’s list, but he was at Oxford at the right time. All they can do is wait until he gets back; Thomas can’t justify sending one of the apprentices over with the possibilities at hand, and certainly can’t go himself.

Mal has started her recovery properly, doing her exercises with a determination that concerns Thomas slightly - apparently physical disability sits poorly with her - but he’s saved from having to say anything, not knowing quite how to start, by Molly. Molly takes the simple expedient of either taking Mal’s exercise equipment away from her, or standing behind her staring silently until Mal gives up. She’s quite taken to the concept of having other people in the Folly, Thomas thinks. He wasn’t sure she would.

Wednesday starts out unpromisingly when Matthew smashes a mug in practice with a poorly-aimed _impello,_ the apple he was attempting to move going nowhere.

“What was that even doing here?” Annie asks as she kneels to pick up pieces. “Ahh!”

“I left it in here yesterday,” Abigail says. “Sorry. You okay?”

“No, I’m just screaming for the fun of it,” Annie snaps; it turns out to not be a serious cut, but then Mal tries to help too fast and has to catch herself on a bench when her leg buckles, snaps herself at Matthew when he tries to help her. Thomas corrals the broken mug with magic and reminds them that they shouldn’t really be mixing food and drink with laboratory space, in best practice - David had told him that so many times, years ago, and cluttered his own lab with empty cups all the same. By the time he’s done that Abigail’s ears are red and her mouth tight, Mal is wincing because she’s pulled at her stitches, Annie is sucking her finger and glowering at Matthew as he pulls out the first aid kit, and Thomas is trying to remember why he ever thought apprentices were a good idea. Of course he didn’t, it was Grant’s idea. Thinking of Grant only leads to a certain amount of - frustration - which doesn’t improve Thomas’s temper.

He doesn’t miss the years when he didn’t have to get out of bed if he couldn’t face the world, but by God, this is the sort of morning that would only be improved by returning to it.

Molly appears at the lab door; a phone call, it must be.

“Tidy this up and keep going, all of you,” Thomas tells them. “I won’t be a moment.”

This turns out to be a lie, though not an intentional one; he’s being called in to a meeting with DPS, immediately. He spends the entire trip tapping his fingers on the steering wheel and trying not to anticipate the reason. It never helps. 

They’re questioning, he is told when he gets there, whether he should be involved with this case at all.

“What?” Thomas says, in sheer disbelief. “Excuse me - could you please explain the rationale for this? What conflict of interest am I supposed to have?”

"Your unit has been focusing on the victim, not the murderer.”

“We’re working on the suspect’s connections now we have an identity, and there may be a link between them we’ve yet to conclusively identify. Bredon turns out to have been involved with a group -”

“The, ah, Little Crocodiles,” says the DPS officer. He’s maybe a decade older than Thomas’s apparent age, solid-looking, not memorable. Good at his job, probably. Thomas hasn’t encountered him before, but then, DPS so rarely has cause to intersect with his cases. Apart from…well. “A group of, er…rogue magicians?”

“That’s overstating the case,” Thomas says. “At least one very dangerous rogue magician, yes. The rest…I could never confirm that any of them had practiced magic beyond their association with Wheatcroft, at Oxford. But certainly many had ties to Sutton – Lewis, Weil, and so on.” Lewis in particular had been volubly cooperative, once identified; only a pity that he’d never worked out what it was his friend, if friend was the word, had wanted with Skygarden. A lack of imagination, there.

“But it’s not illegal, is it?” persisted the DPS officer. “Doing…what they were doing.”

“In the strictest sense, no. But it is dangerous, principally to the user, and in some cases – are you familiar with what we found in that club in Soho?”

The officer looks a little green, meaning the answer is yes. “Familiar enough. We’re getting off-track, though, Thomas.” Using his name is probably supposed to put him at ease, but it sets Thomas’s back up; courtesies are such strange things, so hard to unlearn. “You’ve spent a lot of time looking into the victim and his associates in this case. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest in catching the perpetrator.”

This is so far outside what Thomas was expecting that he stares for a moment.

“I assure you,” he says when he finds his voice. “We have a dead body and a perpetrator who runs the risk of raising some very difficult questions about things it’s my job to keep out of the public eye; I, and my unit, have _every_ interest in finding and arresting him.”

“You’ve encountered him before, though, haven’t you?”

“It’s possible. There was a chimera present at the Berwick Street incident, but I didn’t get a good look at him and we don’t have good CCTV footage of the one we’re looking for. The descriptions are broadly similar. We know there was more than one, but we’ve never identified any of them.”

“So he could be an eyewitness to Berwick Street.”

Thomas opens his mouth, closes it, has to think. “Again - it’s possible. I wasn’t aware of any eyewitnesses - any who survived - at the time, but my attention was rather…focused.” On the faceless magician, on the women he’d…held hostage wasn’t even the right term, was it. Tried to hold hostage, maybe.

“And the victim,” the DPS officer goes on, “was connected to the man you killed at Berwick Street, part of a group you still clearly regard as dangerous.”

“I’m really not sure,” Thomas says coldly, “what you’re suggesting. Either I want to eliminate an eyewitness to my possible misbehaviour or I don’t care about catching him because I’m prejudiced against the victim; pick one, you can’t have both.”

“You aren’t objective about this,” he’s told. “You can’t be. This isn’t a case of another - what do you call them - practitioner, someone you’re the only person capable of taking in. It doesn’t matter which of those things is true, if either are, it matters that it could be, and it matters that we’re getting pressure to do this right. You have other staff in your unit now, kids who were still in primary school fifteen years ago. They can liaise with Homicide. We’re recommending you sit this one out.”

“If there is another magician involved in this,” Thomas warns, “it could get very messy very quickly. I have apprentices, but they’re not ready for that, not by a long shot.”

“If that happens, you’re not going to be in Antarctica. But until then, we’re asking you to step aside.”

“The Commissioner -”

“- has signed off on it.”

Thomas asks to see the paperwork and is shown it; it’s a matter of record. The wording doesn’t tell him anything. The next step up from appeal to the Commissioner is the Home Secretary, and this isn’t at all the sort of emergency that would justify that. Just every sense of danger Thomas has telling him there’s something wrong here.

Tyburn. It’s got to be Tyburn. He didn’t think she had this much pull.

“Will DCI May be continuing as SIO?” he asks, handing the tablet back.

“Yes,” says the officer. “Your constables will work under her.”

Thomas wonders what he can do, and the answer is, for the moment: nothing. There’s nothing he can do.

He goes back to the Folly.

*

The first person he finds is Molly; of course he has to tell her, right away. She claps her hands to her mouth in horror. Thomas feels himself lift his own hands reassuringly. If they were different people he might touch her, but they’re not different people. “It’s alright, it’s alright, I’m going to get it sorted out.”

Molly gathers herself, nods, but her hands are still clenched in fists as she glides off. After a second Thomas hears the faint thud of the rear door; is she going out to the coach house? He wonders why.

Telling the apprentices is worse. Annie is out - word from Beverley Brook, Mal tells him - Matthew is working patiently through CCTV footage, Abigail is going over her interview notes again. Thomas found Mal in the mundane library swearing at Pliny the Younger under her breath, which is a reasonable reaction by anybody’s standards, even if Thomas pretends not to hear the language she uses.

He can’t when he tells her; she says “Fuck, sir, are you kidding me?”

“No, Mal, I’m afraid not.” He tries to keep his voice gentle rather than curt. He’s afraid he fails. 

“But that’s not _fair_ ,” she says, then gathers herself. “They don’t have to be fair. F- _bother_ it. What d’you need us to do?”

Thomas reminds her she’s still on medical leave and tells her to confine her more colourful language to Pliny, which at least gets a smile. Matthew just blinks up at him in confusion, says “Really? But sir - _really_?” and then asks the same question.

Abigail stands up, folds her arms, takes a few paces back in forth.

“Tyburn?” she says abruptly. “Sir. Was it?”

“It’s the likeliest theory,” Thomas allows. “In the meantime, you’ve done the bulk of the interview work, so get yourself over to Belgravia and see what DCI May wants you to do. You can’t talk to me about it.”

She’s already grabbing up her laptop. “On it. And -” She gives him a direct stare. “You know none of us believe you’re not being fair about this case, right, boss? Whatever happened years ago.”

“I know,” says Thomas, because - he does. “Thank you.”

Abigail gives him the uneasy smile of someone who has outpaced her emotional capacity and flees.

He calls Annie and gets her voicemail, tells her to meet Abigail at Belgravia.  Then he looks around the lobby, and, satisfied he’s alone, sinks into a chair, head in his hands.

“God, is it _that_ bad?”

He looks up, and of all the people - it’s Grant.

“What the hell are you doing here?” comes out before he can think about it; the apprentices’ casual cursing is rubbing off on him. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other face to face since they - since they went for dinner. It feels like forever. It’s been maybe a week.

“I’m not here,” Grant says; he’s a little out of breath. “I’m getting lunch for myself because I wanted a walk. I did not get a taxi to drop me off two blocks away and I don’t only have twenty minutes before I have to head back. Did Tyburn seriously manage to get you taken off this case?”

“Yes, and - but then how are you going to have lunch?” Thomas says, fixating on perhaps the least important part of that entire statement.

“Sod lunch, I had a proper breakfast.” Grant folds his arms and continues to loom down at him. “Well, Inspector?”

“I didn’t _ask_ her to do it, assuming it was her.” Thomas stands. “It’s a delaying tactic at best, but there’s no point delaying unless she thinks she can accomplish something in the meantime, and what that - but, with all due respect, how is this any of your business?”

Grant nods like he’s accomplished something; Thomas can’t imagine what. “In that case we’re just going to have to make sure the case gets solved as soon as possible. My business because I bullied you into taking apprentices and now they’re the excuse to take you off this.”

“Also,” Thomas perseveres, “how did you know, unless it’s already gotten around New Scotland Yard -”

“Molly, obviously,” says Grant.

“She really shouldn’t have done that.” Thomas hesitates, but - _he_ hasn’t eaten lunch, either, and it’s nearly two. “Follow me.”

Most weekdays, now, Molly leaves out the makings of sandwiches on the main kitchen table; it doesn’t keep everybody to a strict schedule. She isn’t in the kitchen herself. Thomas is quite glad of it. He’s not terribly happy with her.

“Help yourself,” Thomas tells Grant, and starts putting together his own meal.

“I was fifty percent sure you’d just throw me out,” Grant says, and follows suit. “Sorry. Ask me politely to leave your nick. Look, what I came to say is - how can I help with this? There’s got to be something. I - whose decision was it?”

“Your friend May is being given control of the case,” Thomas says, hesitating over cheese and ignoring the direct question; he doesn’t want to start playing that sort of politics, at least not through Grant. “I can’t ask you to carry information, but -”

“You might as well, seeing as I’m here,” says Grant blithely. “I’m surprised Lesley’s still on; but then I guess pushing you off is as far as Tyburn could get. And it’s not like Lesley _likes_ you.”

“She needs to look harder into the victim and his associates,” Thomas says. “The question isn’t _who_ , it’s _why_ , and that might be answerable even without our culprit.”

They pull out chairs and sit at the table to eat.

“Lesley’s not going to be impressed by that,” says Grant. “She’s the old-fashioned sort of copper. Likes to have somebody to walk up the steps, you know? Preferably the guilty party, or at least _a_ guilty party.”

“DCI May has never struck me as being quite so indiscriminating.”

“No, you’re right, she’s not. That was what I like to call _sarcasm,_ but I hear it was only invented in nineteen eighty five, so you might’ve missed it.”

Thomas can’t help it, huffs a laughing breath at the same time as he tries to take a bite of sandwich. “Nineteen eighty five, you say.”

“My first inspector used to tell me that when he was a constable he’d never have even thought about being sarcastic in front of a senior officer, so I figure it can’t have been around yet.”

They both eat in silence for a minute or two.

“I don’t have anything else,” Thomas says, changing the topic back to what matters; twenty minutes, Grant had said. “I don’t know what taking me off the case is going to do.”

“They’re worried, upstairs,” says Grant, who by any measure _is_ upstairs. “I read the file. You burned a lot of bridges fifteen years ago. That’s why they wouldn’t let you take on an apprentice, afterwards. Did they tell you that?”

“Not in so many words,” says Thomas, feeling weary, but he’d known. “But I knew.”

“Anyway, the thing is, even if it’s specious - it’s not going away any time soon,” Grant says. “I can’t help you with that. I can help you with the case, maybe. With the apprentices.”

“That’s my chief concern,” Thomas admits. “Mal is still on medical leave; she’s out of things for a while. The other three, they could be put under pressure to -”

He cuts off as footsteps sound on the stairs. Too heavy for Abigail, too regular for Mal; it must be Matthew, and so it is.

Matthew stops when he sees them, crooks his head in confusion, and then straightens up from his slight slouch. “Commander Grant? Sir.”

“I’m not here,” Grant tells him. “Possibly your guv is having an unusual hallucinatory episode, which would explain why he’s talking to himself.”

“That’s all right, sir,” Matthew says, after a pause. “We spend a lot of time talking to people who aren’t really there in this unit.”

For Matthew that’s almost cheeky; luckily for him he’s got the right audience. Grant chuckles. “So I hear.”

He looks at his watch. “Bugger, got to get going.”

“PC Blake can give you a lift,” Thomas offers.

Grant just looks at him, but does _not_ point out the lack of subtlety inherent in this offer in front of Matthew; charitable of him, or at least the fellowship of senior officers. “Thanks all the same, I’ll manage. Let me know if you think of…” he trails off. “If there’s anything else.”

“Sir,” Thomas says, and Grant leaves with a nod to Matthew. Probably for the best Matthew came in; otherwise Thomas might have been tempted to - might have been -

He really needs to set it aside, what happened the other night. They said _maybe later_ , but with this - it’s not a good idea, he knows that, Grant knows that.

It’s been so long since he wanted something like this for himself, though. It would have been nice if it were something he could reasonably have.

*

“I can’t believe you managed to fuck somebody off this badly,” says Lesley May. “You! You get a direct line to the Commissioner and everything. What did you do?”

She sounds genuinely bewildered, and it’s not that she’s not capable of misdirection, but Thomas believes her. He’s fairly certain if she did know the details about Berwick Street or any of that, he’d have heard something from her about it in the last fifteen years. Her disapproval has never been subtle, nor silent once she achieved sufficient rank to get away with voicing it.

“I’m sure it will be sorted out soon enough,” he says. “In the meantime, I trust you’ll liaise with my junior officers. I have every confidence you’ll close the case quickly.”

“Thanks, Thomas, I was just waiting for your stamp of approval.” It’s not quite as sarcastic as it could be, though. “You know I’m going to have to keep you totally out of the loop, right? I suppose you can keep working on whatever other weird things you’ve got going. Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. But this – wall of silence. Technically we’re not even supposed to have this conversation.”

“Yes,” he says. “It would be better if Annie and Abigail weren’t based here, for appearances’ sake; could you find them office space at Belgravia while they’re working this case?”

She doesn’t seem to have expected that, starts slightly, but nods. “I can do that. You haven’t had that much time with them, they’re still tolerable. Sahra’s a bit unhappy you swiped Abigail, mind you. Wouldn’t go expecting any favours from her anytime soon.”

“I wasn’t anyway.” Sahra Guleed came up through Belgravia as well, though she’d transferred later; in any case they rarely need help from Fraud. 

“I just hope you’re working on this,” May goes on. “You know Peter will go to bat for you where he can, right? It might help more than you think, everybody likes Peter. Except when they take a violent dislike to him, but that’s mostly the idiots anyway.” 

“It’s…being addressed,” Thomas says carefully. He knows Grant wants to help; is not sure it will be helpful. “The best thing to do now is to solve the case, find Miller. Getting him into custody is likely to make most of this problem go away.” If he understands the case against him correctly, anyway. “That is, if you’re inclined to be helpful.”

“I’m inclined to do my sodding job,” says May. “Whether it helps you or not is beside the point; someone’s dead and I want someone to arrest for it. The guilty party, for preference.”

“Thank you,” says Thomas. She glowers at him. 

*

It’s harder than he thought it would be, being walled off like this from a case his apprentices are still working. Conversations cease when he walks into the room; there are unaccustomed silences at dinner, when somebody goes to ask a question and then thinks better of it. Fortunately they’re also all entering the exciting new territory of a new _forma_ , as well as Tacitus – everybody except for Annie, who is far enough ahead he’s got her to start on Greek as well – as well as all the usual small bits and bobs the rest of the Met tosses their way, so there’s other things to discuss.

It isn’t that he doesn’t trust Lesley May, but he’s really not minded to sit this one out any longer than he has to, so he’s suggested – indirectly – that Abigail and Annie should make sure they follow up every contact they have. Miller has been around for years, somewhere. Somebody knows where and why, and where he might have gone. They won’t talk to him, even if he were still on the case. The apprentices, there’s a chance.

He’s not entirely shut off, either; this is his home, after all, so it doesn’t really qualify as eavesdropping if he overhears things. By anybody’s standards, surely.

“What did Inspector Kumar say?” Abigail is asking Annie.

“That he’ll have to check the Crossrail plans, and they got filed away years ago. If the originals are even still there,” says Annie. “He seems awfully suspicious, I have to say.”

“That’s ‘cause he’s smart,” Abigail grouses. “Look at the kind of people we’re dealing with.”

“It would be interesting to have a real cover-up,” Annie says thoughtfully. “Never had one of those.”

“You mean, like our entire job right now?”

“It’s not the same, though. We’re not covering anything up most of the time. We’re just not reporting extraneous details.”

That’s accurate enough; Thomas disapproves of cover-ups, on the whole. They get messy very quickly. So much easier to just not tell people things they don’t need to know.

*

The charade-like nature of the entire thing is revealed in its entirety when Thomas gets called in as soon as they actually find something. May makes the call, but she hastens to inform him she’s not the one who okayed it.

“DPS gave in,” she says. “After the third _I don’t know_ from your constables I had to do something, and it got pushed up the chain to the Assistant Commissioner and then back down.”

“Is Miller in custody?” Thomas asks.

“Yes, but you’re not allowed anywhere near him; they haven’t gone that soft. It’s where we found him that we need you for. It’s a bit of a mess, don’t wear your good clothes.”

Thomas wears his white Burberry which is prone to showing every stain, firstly because he’s never encountered a stain yet Molly couldn’t take care of, secondly because he’s going to have to put on one of those ridiculous disposable forensics suits anyway if it’s an actual crime scene, and thirdly because it will annoy May intensely. It used to have just the same effect on her mentor.

It’s probably not within the spirit of things, but he sends Matt to go find out where Miller is and what they’re doing with him.

“You can’t tell me about it, I think,” he says, “but it would be helpful for you to know.”

“I could -” Mal tries, and Thomas cuts her off. “You’re still on medical leave and you got injured trying to arrest him.”

Mal scowls, but lets it go. Matt says “Anything you want me to pass on?”

Mal sighs. “Nah. No fun swearing at people second-hand.”

The thing they’ve found that requires his presence is some sort of underground space, constructed during Crossrail and marked as an emergency exit on the plans. Jaget Kumar identified it, and Miller turned out to have been hiding in it. There’s all the usual debris of squatting, combined with the very strong and musky smell of cat, though it looks like he hasn’t been here long - maybe only since Bredon’s death. There’s also a body.

“Old,” Abdul tells Thomas. “You don’t want to look at it if you don’t have to, but of course you have to. A decade at least, and I’m surprised there’s this much left of it.”

Thomas looks unflinchingly. He’s seen worse. This one is, after all, most definitively dead. So dead there’s little chance of telling much about him - or her, possibly - from anything short of a full forensic examination.

The space is cylindrical, maybe sixty feet deep and twenty across; you can descend to the bottom via a metal staircase, as well as a lift that may or may not work. Certainly nobody’s using it.

“So?” asks May. “What is this?”

“I have no idea,” Thomas tells her. “There’s nothing obviously magical about it.” He looks at Kumar. “Is this something to do with your Quiet People?”

“They’re not mine, exactly,” he says. “And nah, not at all - you’d know if you’d ever seen their tunnels. This is something else.”

“Constructed during Crossrail, somebody said.”

“Seems to have been, and then abandoned.”

“Fifteen years ago, maybe?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Kumar says. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

May frowns. “You know something.”

“I suspect something, but it circles back to the reason I was pulled off this in the first place,” Thomas says.

“Fuck.” May sighs. “It would do. If I asked your apprentices -”

“They know the basics. Meanwhile - what’s happening with Miller? Did he say anything when you took him in?”

“Now that I’m definitely not supposed to tell you,” she says. “But he didn’t, barely even acknowledged his own name, so there’s nothing you don’t know anyway.”

“What is the reason you were pulled off this?” Kumar wants to know. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

Thomas looks away. “Miller may have been an eyewitness to an incident that resulted in multiple fatalities, over a decade ago.”

“I heard that,” says May. “What’s their argument – you can’t be trusted near him?”

“They can’t seem to decide between that and wanting to let him go because I think the victim deserved what he got, actually.”

May looks surprisingly thoughtful. “That…ties in to some other things I’ve heard.” She shakes her head when Thomas and Kumar look at her enquiringly. “Nope; I don’t have time to stand around gossiping.”

Thomas translates this as _I’m more worried about what happens to me if I tell you than you being annoyed with me for not saying anything._

Kumar looks at him then glances away, and Thomas wishes he had a better explanation; wishes he knew what to say in a way they’d understand.

“In any case,” Thomas says, “the job’s not done.”

“Excuse you,” says May. “We’ve made an arrest, there’s half a dozen lines of evidence saying he did it; what about that’s _not done_?”

“I need to know what put Bredon and Miller in contact,” Thomas says. “That’s the part that really might concern me and my unit. I understand I’m not allowed near him, but if I could at least -”

“No,” says May. “No, no, and also: no. We’ve made an arrest, odds-on we’ll get a conviction if we can get him in front of a court without it turning into a three-ring circus, unless you’ve got evidence of another actual crime I don’t care. Take it up with somebody else.” She walks away.

“Get one of your constables to interview him,” Kumar suggests. “Sounds like that’ll fly.”

“Yes,” says Thomas. “Maybe.”

In the meantime, he’s going to try something else.

*

Over the years Thomas has generally avoided most of the Met’s internal politics by the simple expedient of ignoring it. In technical terms he’s part of Specialist Crime, but he’s always reported directly to the Commissioner. He’s never bothered aiming lower when he needed something, and there haven’t been that many occasions for it anyway; the average senior investigating officer, when confronted with the involvement of magic in their case, just wants him to finish and be gone as soon as possible. Of recent years, if it can be thrown onto his budget as well, it makes them positively happy.

Grant had said _if there’s anything I can do_ , though, so – it has to be worth a shot. Even if approaching him over this makes Thomas feel vaguely like he’s mixing the personal and the professional.

“Alright, what is it?” Grant says in clipped tones when Thomas is let into his office.

“Is this a bad time?” Thomas asks.

“No.” Grant sighs, slouches down into his chair, insomuch as it’s the type that allows for slouching. “Yes. Not really. I just had the _fun_ kind of advisory group meeting, and I can’t even yell at the people responsible. Have a seat.”

Thomas takes one. “Is the fun kind one where you take responsibility for our organisation’s wrongdoings in general?”

“How did you guess,” says Grant. “The usual kind of thing – wait, you probably don’t have a lot of contact with the usual kind of thing. Idiots at ground level harassing people, and their direct supervisors not thinking it’s that important.”

“I don’t see why you can’t reprimand the responsible parties directly.”

“Firstly, that would be the worst sort of overkill – we’re talking about constables and PCSOs – secondly, I can’t afford to be that person.” Grant folds his arms, smiles a little grimly. “You might get away with it, I’ve got to be in control. It’s about what it looks like in the back of people’s heads.”

Thomas thinks he gets what Grant is sketching out, doesn’t quite understand it at an intuitive level, but nods anyway. “I see, I think.”

“It doesn’t help, anyway,” says Grant. “Yelling, getting angry, all the rest of it. They’ve done studies, you’d know if you ever did any of the management training courses – letting out aggression like that just reinforces it. Wouldn’t fix them, wouldn’t help me.”

Thomas would rather walk back into a battle than a management training course. “It’s amazing what they’ve done studies on, these days.”

Grant snorts. “Your scepticism is noted. Okay, back to my first question – what is it? DPS still have you on the bench? I know Miller’s in custody.”

“Your friend Lesley thinks that’s the end of it, done and dusted,” Thomas says. “It’s not; we still don’t have a motive.”

Grant nods. “What do you want, exactly?”

“To interview him.”

“I can’t make that happen,” Grant says immediately. “DPS won’t have it. One of the apprentices, yeah, but you don’t need me for that, you just need to get Lesley to – okay, maybe you do need me for that.”

“Not in your official position, so much, but…”

“You know the funny thing is, you and Lesley have a lot in common, really.” Grant smirks at Thomas’s expression. “Fine, you don’t think so. What’s so important about Miller, apart from him being a loose end from the Berwick Street thing?”

“I don’t think he’s important in himself at all,” Thomas says. “I think it’s Bredon, and I want to know what Bredon said to him, why he panicked.”

“You think he panicked?”

“Hard to tell at this remove, but we haven’t precisely had a rash of mauled corpses around the city. Either he’s good at hiding bodies or this is the first time he’s killed somebody.”

“Hmm.” Grant thinks about this. “Okay, I’ll talk to Lesley, but I want to talk about something else, too: what’s going to happen to him now?”

“Technically that’s neither of our decision,” Thomas feels obliged to point out.

Grant gives him a look. “How we handle this is definitely going to impact ongoing relations with the wider community, if you’ll excuse the jargon, which makes it absolutely my problem, and they’ll take your recommendations for lack of better options, I think. What would have happened in the past?”

“Shot on sight,” Thomas says, tries not to wince at the way Grant’s face goes perfectly neutral.

“Yeah, no.” Grant drums his fingers on the desk. “He’s been arrested on suspicion of murder - he did it, obviously, or, wait, are you sure there isn’t more than one cat-person running around?”

“The contrary, from what we found, but there’s DNA evidence.”

“Good enough for now. Murder, assault on a police officer while we’re at it, probably a bunch of minor stuff, the point is he’s due a trial, same as anybody else. I don’t care about magic or chimeras or the rest of it, the charges are for CPS to lay and a judge and jury get to decide whether he’s guilty. But how we could possibly pull it off…”

“There is no judge and jury that will give him a fair hearing.” Not to mention the rest of it, if he’s found guilty as he undoubtedly would be.

“Jesus Christ,” says Grant. “He was used for illegal medical experimentation, he’s been hiding for fifteen years, and we can’t even - fine. What do you think we should do?”

Thomas has to take a moment for that, just to look at Grant, uniform tie a bit askew, frowning thoughtfully, utterly convinced that they have a duty of care, that they owe Jacob Miller something. That’s Grant’s real gift, he’s starting to think: he looks at London and considers himself bound to everybody in it, doesn’t stop to question it or draw dividing lines between the deserving and undeserving.

“Plea negotiation, perhaps,” he says. “There’s room for it not to go to public trial in _exceptional circumstances,_ which we could certainly cite. The sentence might not even have to be reduced all that much; I doubt Miller is interested in becoming a matter of public record, either.”

“I hate those,” Grant says, bluntly. “Never should have been made possible in the first place. It puts the power in all the wrong places.”

“Nevertheless,” Thomas says. “I’ve considered it before, though there’s never been an applicable situation. I know it’s not ideal. I don’t think we’re in any doubt about his guilt.”

“The point is that whether _we’re_ in doubt shouldn’t decide what happens to him. We’re not judge, jury and executioner. Or we’re not supposed to be. Look, what I’m worried about - what I’m trying to ask - is how are the community going to take this?”

“I don’t know,” says Thomas. “Historically that wasn’t something we worried about, unless it looked likely to lead to violence. I don’t think they expect much, to be frank.”

“What’s the last time you had something like this?” Grant wants to know. “That you had…people…you could arrest for a specific, straightforward crime. You know, murder, that sort of thing.”

“Varvara Tamonina,” Thomas says without hesitation. “But she was a practitioner, not - anything else, so it wasn’t quite…there is a general expectation that I’m responsible for practitioners, regardless of whether they’re trained in the Newtonian - the British - tradition. In fact, when it came to the confrontation at Berwick Street - I know you read the file - I was given to understand later that nobody much cared what I did to or with that faceless…with a rogue magician who had, ultimately, been trained by a former Folly member. It was seen as an internal dispute.”

“But it wasn’t just him, other people got caught in the crossfire.”

Thomas nods. “If you like - that was probably the last time there was any question of being required to arrest somebody magical for a…how did you put it. A simple, straightforward crime. After that, I think people started keeping their heads down. Even further down.”

“I read the report,” says Grant. “And I read the inquiry report, from DPS. The fact that nobody appears to give a shit what the magical community think is why you kept your job, as far as I can tell; that and you convinced them your ‘rogue magician’ was a genuine and serious danger. Don’t make that face, I wasn’t casting aspersions. Based on what I know you weren’t wrong.” Thomas wasn’t aware he was making any sort of face, but Grant has at some point gotten dangerously good at reading him. “Then again, you know all that, because that’s why you got pulled off this case now; it was a loose thread for somebody to pull, with Miller at the heart of it, if I’m not mistaken.”

“What’s your point? Sir.”

Grant spreads a hand, palm-up. “Tell me your side of it.”

“You said you read the report.”

“Reports are for senior officers and inquiries.”

“You’re one of those things.”

Grant just looks at him expectantly, face calm.

Thomas takes a breath. “It started when…no, that’s not right. It started in the spring, when a ghost went on a killing spree all across London.”

He sketches out the Punch case briefly, the possessions and deaths, the way he’d been two steps behind for almost all of it, the Covent Garden riot and fires.

“That was a ghost?” Grant is genuinely startled. “I was a probationer at Charing Cross when that was kicking off. Unconnected murders, I thought.”

“Well, that was the story that we stuck to,” says Thomas. “The thing is, I didn’t solve that one, not really. The…spirit…whatever it was; it played out its game and then it ran out of story. Or attention. Or energy, I don’t know. I didn’t exorcise it, or anything like that.”

“Do you really do exorcisms?” Grant seems to find this funny.

“No priests required.”

Grant does let out a soft laugh. “All right. How does this relate -”

“Possessions,” Thomas says. “Remember Abdul’s brain collection? All the victims, the possessed, their brains looked like that when the spirit was done with them. Then a couple of months later he sensed _vestigia_ on a corpse, and checked the brain. It was drained of magic in the same way. It’s not unique to possession by a ghost - victims of vampires have the same symptoms - but in the absence of the other usual signs…”

“Like being drained of blood?”

“Oh, no, the human body has more blood than they can consume, it’s a much messier process than that.”

Grant makes a face. “Well, I asked. Not vampires; you went looking for a ghost again?”

“It was a possibility,” says Thomas. “What I found was three women who’d been alive since the Cafe de Paris bombing in 1941. They seemed to be…they enspelled jazz musicians, drained magic from them. Sometimes the musicians died, sometimes they were just left permanently damaged, from the barely noticeable to severe impairment. Lots of cases of drug and alcohol addiction, that sort of thing.”

This time it’s his turn to read something barely noticeable in Grant’s face; he remembers abruptly their conversation about Grant’s father, can’t quite remember how his career had ended but surely – this is not at all the time for that, though, if ever.

“It wasn’t like vampires,” he hastens on. “Otherwise they seemed to go about quite normal lives. I interviewed one briefly and I knew there was something off, something magical, but not – it wasn’t what I expected. They had jobs, they shopped for groceries, they liked to listen to the Archers, somebody told me. And they all lived together in a flat in Berwick Street.”

“So you went to arrest them.”

“No,” Thomas says. This is important; he mustn’t get it wrong. Even if Grant’s not going to like it. Not one bit. “I went to kill them. It didn’t go as planned.” He pauses.

Grant folds his arms. “Okay.”

Apparently that’s a prompt to continue. “I expected a…nest. Like you get with vampires. I expect you got Annie to tell you…everything’s dead, around a vampire nest. Even the bacteria in the soil, so I’m told. I thought it would be obvious, where they lived…I got there and they had flowers; not fresh ones, a few days old. You couldn’t get that with vampires. It’s not possible.”

He still remembers it, opening the door to the flat, every sense on high alert, and seeing the flowers on the table. They weren’t even in a vase, just shoved carelessly into a glass jar, one or two petals fallen to the tabletop.  Like a bucket of cold water over his head he’d known it was wrong, it was all wrong, no _tactus disvitae_ , no death. There was _vestigia_ , right enough, the smell of honeysuckle and brick dust faint on the air, the same thing he’d sensed around Simone Fitzwilliam, but whatever this was, burning the nest out wasn’t going to work; maybe even Frank and his boys on standby with their helicopter wasn’t going to be the right approach.

It was only being on high alert that had saved him when the chimera had sprung at him from behind. He’d knocked the creature down the stairs, but the sight of it had said that something else was wrong, very wrong indeed, and when he’d arrived on the rooftop to find the three women clustered there being lectured to by a man who hid his face with magic, he’d started to get the outline of what it was that might be wrong.

“He wasn’t expecting me, didn’t know who I was until I told him my name. And then he thought it was funny, or - fortunate, even, that he deserved a chance to test himself. By which he meant beating me in a magical duel, killing me, I think. God knows he didn’t scruple at that from everything else we found later. He owned up to the chimera I’d encountered at the entrance to the flat. That was enough.”

“Enough for what?” asks Grant.

“Enough to condemn him,” Thomas says. “There’s no way to get the magic you need to do something like that without killing for it. There just isn’t, not for human practitioners. And, before you ask, so far as I know there’s no way to get someone who’s not a human practitioner to volunteer theirs.” Involuntarily - well, Ettersberg had shown that was another story. No need to mention that. “That being said, if at all possible I wanted to arrest him. I needed to know where he’d come from, what he thought he was doing, why he thought he could get away with it.”

“Why he didn’t even know who you were, when you’re supposed to be the person who keeps people like him from happening,” Grant says, a little dryly.

“Well, I think in retrospect he may have been under the impression I was dead. Anyway, he was good, very good. A genuine master of the art. He didn’t expect me to be up to his standard. When he realised he wasn’t going to win he tried to make a break for it.”

“You’re telling me you had a knock-down drag-out magical duel on a rooftop in Soho and it didn’t make YouTube.”

“Anybody close enough to get a good view would have had their device destroyed by magic.”

“And you’re just that good? He knew he couldn’t win?”

Thomas has been in plenty of fights, but every one is a fight you can lose; this had been no different. But ninety percent of how he gets his job done, by now, is the impression that he won’t lose, not one of confidence but of knowledge.

“I went to war before his parents were born,” he says. “He’d never been in a magical duel before, so far as I can figure - with whom, and when? So no - he wasn’t going to win, and he realised it, and when he tried to get away I went in pursuit.”

“Is this where the suspects you were there for re-enter the picture?”

Suspects is such an innocuous way to put it. “They hadn’t gone far; they were arguing at the bottom of the stairs. I’m still not sure what about. I think they thought - they wondered if they should help.”

“That wasn’t in the report,” Grant says, quietly.

“It’s speculation at best,” Thomas admits. “And I don’t know who they wanted to help. They may have just thought they needed to defend themselves against the winner.”

“Then the fight starts again, and they die in the crossfire. Right?”

Thomas doesn’t think he’d made it sound like that. It didn’t happen like that. That would have been simpler.

“He tried,” he says. “The magician, I mean. He tried to use them as hostages.”

“You keep not saying his name.”

“It doesn’t mean anything.” What he was had been more important than who, in that moment, if Thomas had even had a name to give him. Of course there’d been one after, and that had caused half the trouble.

“Wait,” Grant says, standing up to pace forward and back a step or two behind his desk. “The suspects, these women, jazz vampires or whatever they were - they couldn’t defend themselves? You said they were draining people’s magic.”

“I don’t think,” Thomas says slowly, “in retrospect, in light of what happened - I don’t think they knew what they were doing. I don’t think it was intentional.”

“And you still went in there intending to-”

“In retrospect,” Thomas emphasises. “It wasn’t until they didn’t do anything, when in danger, that it became apparent that might be the case. I never got the chance to talk to any of them, not really.”

“So,” says Grant. He leans against his chair, arms still folded; his eyes are very hard. “What then?”

“I told him,” Thomas tries to keep his voice neutral, “that I was there to arrest them, they were suspects for murder, what I thought they were.”

_Did it take you that long to figure it out,_ the magician had said, like he thought Thomas was slow, or careless. Maybe he had been. _Of course that’s what they are._

One of them had gasped; the other one had shaken her head. “No, we wouldn’t - we don’t want to hurt anybody!”

“Of course you don’t,” the magician had said soothingly, but she’d flinched back as if he’d tried to touch her. It was like he’d forgotten, for a second, he was theoretically holding them hostage to Thomas’s acquiescence.

“I told him,” Thomas says, not in the words he’d used for the report, but the weary truth, “I told him I couldn’t let him go, that he’d done things that couldn’t be allowed to go on. I told him saving them wasn’t more important to me than that, that…they were what I was there to protect people from.”

“You thought he’d let them go if they weren’t useful,” Grant says quietly, and Thomas isn’t stupid, he can recognise an interrogation when he’s on the wrong side of it. Too late to stop, though, even if he wanted to.

“I was telling him the truth. Let’s not put a better face on it. But it is true, if you like, that I didn’t think he’d kill them – he’d been trying to recruit them, I thought, if they weren’t useful as hostages they might be useful as…”

“Minions,” says Grant immediately, and then apparently thinks better of it. “Uh. But you were wrong.”

“But I was wrong.”

Thomas has seen and been responsible for more deaths than he likes to think about – it’s not pretty when you add it up, even considering the war – so he can’t even say these were the worst. They’re certainly not the only ones he could have in theory prevented. They’re not even in the category of things he truly regrets, but they’re the ones he has to recount right now.

“He killed them, we fought, I killed him. It’s not much more complicated than that.”

Grant wipes a hand over his face. “Do you remember when I asked why you were a police officer?”

Thomas nods. “I remember what I told you. What else would I be? After the war, when everybody else was gone – everything else the Folly had done, most of it had no purpose any more, the things that were left…policing was the closest thing to it. And you said, this isn’t policing, and for some of it you weren’t wrong.”

There are certain priorities held by the modern Met, in theory if somewhat intermittently in practice: that everybody has the same rights, that officers must carry out their duties without fear or favour, that they owe everyone the same treatment and same justice. The Folly’s priorities had never been that. 

“You know, you saying that to me, that’s the only reason…” Grant says, and trails off. “Is that it? The end of what happened, from your point of view?”

“My back-up arrived,” Thomas says. “That’s not really in the report, because it upsets the DPS too much. Not SCO-19. Reservists from the infantry unit that was with us in the last battle of the war. Not something we needed before then, but when it was down to just me…”

Grant groans. “No, Jesus _Christ,_ please do not tell me any more about paramilitary troops running around London, for the sake of plausible deniability if nothing else. Okay. Ignoring the details of who, did they see much of what happened?”

“Just the aftermath.”

“And the chimera,” Grant says. “The one you knocked down the stairs. Was that Miller?”

“I have no idea. He was gone by the time Frank Caffrey and - by the time anybody else got there. We looked, at the time, but never found him. And then when we did find the Soho club…that blew everything else out of the water.”

“If you had found him, then. What was the plan?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas says. “I don’t have an answer. There was certainly more than one chimera held at the club. We never found any of them. We never had to have a plan, because of that. Some or all of them were probably the victims of sex trafficking, based on some of what we found.”

“Jesus,” Grant says again. “Yeah, I remember that part of the report. Because it needed to get worse. Miller…”

“No idea,” Thomas says. “No way to tell, unless he decides to talk about any of that. Which, right now, he’s not.”

“A lawyer might be able to help him figure out what he does and doesn’t want to say. When he gets assigned one. If and when one can be found who’ll take the case and not - do you know if there’s anybody who deals with magic, come to that? Some firm it’s a specialty for? You can’t tell me Tyburn doesn’t have lawyers.”

“Even if I did, I couldn’t recommend them; conflict of interest. But that’s never been - never been a concern.”

“Right.” Grant rubs his jaw. “For future reference: it probably should be. People who can’t tell their defense counsel the truth about what happened, whether or not they’re telling the truth otherwise, that’s not reasonable.”

“The problem is, in general,” Thomas says, “nobody is keen for the general public to find out about any of - any of the issues we deal with. Not me, not the Commissioner, not the Home Office, certainly not anybody within the demi-monde. Even someone like Tyburn; her problem is not being in charge of dealing with these issues, she wouldn’t want them to be a matter of public record.”

“A Ministry for Magic,” says Grant, and then “Sorry, I’m sure you’ve heard that joke before.”

“Once or twice,” Thomas allows. Grant huffs a soft laugh, finally re-takes his seat.

“What I’ve heard,” he says, “is that Miller will be kept in solitary confinement for now, while they figure out - while something is figured out. Which can’t go on forever, because that’s its own form of cruel and unusual punishment, but for the moment…”

“Yes.” That always has been the problem; what are you going to do, have a special jail? How many steps is it from there to Ettersberg? Fewer than Thomas likes to think about. “That seems like a reasonable first step.”

“Keep thinking about it,” Grant advises. “I’m going to be. You can’t have the respect of the community if you can’t treat certain people in it equally. You just can’t. You need better solutions.”

“That’s becoming apparent.”

They’re both silent for a moment.

“It got around, didn’t it?” Grant says. “Berwick Street, what happened. Some of it. And people didn’t trust you anymore.”

“Do you mean the demi-monde, or the Met?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” Thomas says. “I think so. I don’t know how, but yes.”

*

Grant’s as good as his word, not that Thomas expected less; Abigail is called to sit in on an interview with Miller the next day. (Thomas doesn’t learn this directly; Annie comes back to the Folly and tells Mal, in a conversation that technically doesn’t include him. They both glance over at him so often that he’s tempted to tell them to get on with it; he doesn’t, of course. Not verbally, anyway.)

“As far as DCI May’s concerned, the case really is wrapped up now,” Abigail tells everybody that evening. “She got a confession, that’s all she wants. My bit of the interview isn’t on the record.”

“What did he have to say for himself?”

Abigail pulls out her notebook. Thomas finds it obscurely satisfying that they’ve all returned to using pen and paper, the electronics problem making digital forms of notation impractical. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate modern technology, but some of it feels like change for the sake of change.

“He didn’t really want to talk,” she says, leafing through to the right page. “About much at all. He’s not very…it’s hard for him to speak, I think. With his mouth, and everything. Here we go. I told him we just wanted to know what Bredon wanted.”

“Was it -” says Mal.

“Ew, no, thank god,” says Abigail. “He said, eventually, that Bredon said they might be able to help each other, and then…okay, he got side-tracked into worrying what was going to happen to him.”

“What is going to happen to him?” Annie wants to know. “May didn’t say.”

“Still to be decided, as far as I’m aware,” Thomas says, thinking of his conversation with Grant. “There’s not a lot of precedent.”

“He was worried about being treated like a freak,” Abigail says, bluntly. “Or experimented on, or. Things like that. But he was more worried about wizards – about us – than the police.”

Thomas can guess why.

“Did you get him back on track?”

“Yeah.” Abigail closes the notebook, apparently having refreshed her memory.  “Bredon wanted to know about something that happened fifteen years ago, someone he’d seen get killed. And he wouldn’t say anything else, but I think…it sounds like he didn’t wanna talk about it, and Bredon made noises about all that stuff he was worried about – getting locked up or whatever – and he panicked.”

That’s – more or less what Thomas expected at this point: but why now, what was Bredon’s plan?

“And he didn’t say why Bredon was asking about this.”

“I think he didn’t care,” says Abigail. She looks at him. “Fifteen years ago. Was this – your faceless magician? Is that what he wanted to know about?”

“I can only assume so,” says Thomas. “What relevance it might suddenly have now, I don’t know.”

*

After a great deal of consultation, Miller is remanded for psychiatric assessment; it’s the best Thomas can come up with, and it’s agreed to up the chain.

“Is there any evidence he’s actually mentally unstable?” Grant wants to know. “I get there aren’t any better options; I couldn’t think of any.”

“Not in the conventional sense, no,” Thomas says. “But it allows the whole thing - and him - to be quietly shuffled to one side for the moment. His appearance can be explained away as plastic surgery, combined with…there’s a condition, I don’t remember the exact term. Excessive hair growth.”

“Hypertrichosis,” says Grant at once.

“How do you even -”

“Read about it somewhere, I don’t know. That’ll work. And the plastic surgery argument makes him look even less mentally stable for assessment, which…” Grant grimaces. “Fantastic; I foresee a lot of complaints about our attitude to mental illness, depending on how much media coverage that gets. Not unreasonably. At least I’m not specifically responsible for that area.”

Thomas shrugs. “We have to have _some_ explanation.”

“Lesley’s going to be furious.”

“She wanted a conviction,” Thomas agrees. “She hates it every time she has a case connected to me and she doesn’t get one. I sometimes suspect she’s keeping a tally.”

“She is,” says Grant absently, and then looks concerned. “Do _not_ tell her I told you that.”

Thomas has to laugh at that; Grant cracks a sheepish grin. It’s comfortable, but then Thomas has to look away. He doesn’t know exactly where he stands with Grant now; asking him for help seems to have returned them to a purely professional footing. And he suspects, still, that there are things Grant isn’t telling him.

But Grant doesn’t seem to see it that way; instead Thomas starts getting text messages from him, a tentative connection. Thomas has never been quite sure of the utility of text messages, vastly prefers actual conversations, but Grant’s don’t usually demand an answer; they’re just…there.

_How are the constables doing_ , Grant will say.

_Apprentices,_ Thomas responds. _The apprentices are progressing surprisingly well. Apples are exploding all over the lab._

_Is that good?_

_It’s a sign of progress._

_Have you got them safety glasses_

_Safety glasses?_

The next message is a picture of a standard pair of lab safety glasses, followed by _are you kidding me_

_Yes_ , Thomas responds.

_Yes you’re kidding me or yes you’re providing them with safety equipment?_

_Yes._

Thomas is beginning to get the impression Annie must have been quite circumspect when she’d told Grant about the vampire nest; he can’t imagine Grant not having something to say about the use of phosphorus grenades.

_Who put you in charge of people, whose genius idea was that_ , Grant responds, and Thomas is partially quite offended and partially aware that it’s eleven o’clock at night and, judging by the hours at which he’s received some of these messages, Grant hasn’t been getting a lot of sleep recently.

_I believe it was yours,_ he responds, and it’s not really a surprise when the front doorbell rings fifteen minutes later and it’s Grant.

“I – have no idea what I’m actually doing here,” Grant admits. “It was just getting unsatisfying telling you off in a hundred and fifty characters or less.”

“Tea?” Thomas offers.

“You know that there’s almost as much caffeine in black tea as in coffee, right? Which makes that an appallingly bad idea, this time of night,” says Grant. “Why not.”

Molly has gone to bed, or at least left the kitchen – Thomas knows she doesn’t really sleep very much – so Thomas deals with the teapot himself, while Grant half-dozes at the kitchen table, head propped against a fist. It’s almost domestic.

“You’ve been busy,” Thomas says while the tea brews.

“That happens,” Grant says, changing position to hang one arm over the back of his chair; his jacket is undone and his tie slightly askew, and he looks younger than he ever has. “Honestly, I’m not good when it’s not busy, my brain starts going in circles. I notice you’ve been keeping your head down since the Miller thing.”

“That happens,” Thomas says, fetching down mugs. “It’s like any sort of crime; things ebb and flow. It’s good, since you’ve seen fit to provide me with _four_ people to train.”

“Best start as we mean to go on,” says Grant. “Ten years, you said, and then if there’s two of you at the end of it? Fantastic, if you get hit by a bus we’re in the same place we started, and that’s assuming you don’t rejoin the rest of us on the slow frogmarch towards old age. This way you might actually think about expanding.”

Thomas blinks at him, considering this; it’s late, after all. “What do you want out of this? Sir.”

“What I told you,” Grant says. “For you to be able to do it right. Or _try_ to. It’s not complicated.”

Thomas thinks it’s very complicated indeed, but forbears saying so, on account of the hour.

They sit for a while in silence, and pretend to sip their tea; Grant was right, it is an appallingly bad idea at this hour.

“I was serious about the safety equipment,” Grant says eventually. “There’s been about three rounds of changes to the health and safety regs since I joined, let alone since you started; we have a responsibility to proactively prevent accidents now. I realized – when were you learning magic? The stuff you’re teaching them?”

“Shortly before the Great War,” says Thomas.

“Yeah, I thought as much. Just – look up the regs, think about what you can do. This needs to be – we’ve only got so much leeway for it, you know that, right? If one of them gets hurt, seriously, the Commissioner might just call it all off. Cecelia – Tyburn – she might – you’re not the only alternative anymore, maybe you haven’t been for years. I don’t know if you realise that.”

Thomas looks at him coolly. “I do realise that. Would you consider that an acceptable outcome?”

Grant looks down into his mug like it has answer. “I’m withholding judgement.” He looks up. “Sorry; I know you want a better answer. But right now it’s the truth.”

“I do appreciate that,” Thomas says, carefully.

“It’s not…personal,” says Grant.

“I didn’t think it was.”

“I should go.” Grant doesn’t right away, though; they sit there for another ten minutes, at least.

Thomas wishes he knew what _he_ wanted. It might make things simpler.

*

Grant’s mention of Tyburn concerns him. He hasn’t heard anything from her for months now, despite his assumption she was responsible for pushing him off the case. It makes him uneasy. There’s no official case anymore for him to investigate, and he doesn’t have access to the records from it anyway - he’s still circumscribed from it even if it’s not an active investigation - so he has to start with what he knows. He _could_ just get the apprentices to do it, but that doesn’t seem reasonable.

That resolve lasts until Annie walks in on him trying to reconstruct the timeline for Bredon on the chalkboard in the lecture theatre they never use.

“What are you doing in - oh.” She has to take a few steps back to read all of it. “Sir, do you want me to fill that in a bit, maybe?”

“I’m still not allowed near the Miller case,” he reminds her. “I’m not asking any of you to -”

“Oh, right, yes.” She taps her foot. “Do you know, I came to find you because Mal needs your help in the lab?”

“Is that so?”

“Yes.” Annie nods. “Right now. Very important. Please, sir?”

Thomas looks at the chalkboard, looks at Annie, considers the likelihood of having to avoid files left accidentally open on the computer and papers spread across the library table for the next however long, and decides discretion is the greater portion of valour.

Mal is, of course, not even _in_ the lab, but that’s hardly the point.

The thing Thomas hones in on, once he’s taken in Annie’s annotations - not only hers, he’s fairly sure, but it’s all her handwriting - is Harrison, Bredon’s Oxford friend. He’d been in the States when the murder occurred, but was interviewed briefly, not by Annie or Abigail, more’s the pity. Thomas had looked into him fifteen years ago and crossed him off as a potential problem. There had been financial ties between him and some of the companies involved with the Skygarden end of things, not that Thomas had ever quite gotten to the bottom of that, but no evidence he’d continued as an active practitioner.

Still, he’s the only other member of the Little Crocodiles tied to this case, as far as Thomas knows. He dispenses with pretense and invites suggestions from the apprentices over supper for further lines of inquiry, laying forth briefly the history of the group at Oxford, but keeping back, for now, those words of Grant’s. _You’re not the only alternative._

Abigail pounces on the financial end of things, understandably given her background. “Did Fraud or Organised Crime ever go anywhere with that?”

“No,” Thomas says. “I don’t think there was anything prosecutable. Some ties to some rather questionable Russians.”

“SFO?” she suggests. “Trying to get public housing destroyed, they might be interested.”

Matt says something incomprehensible through a mouthful of cottage pie, and everybody waits for him to swallow. “ It’s still there, though. Skygarden Estate? That big ugly thing in Southwark, right?”

“Of course it is, Sky lives there,” says Mal. “You know - Nicky’s friend? They’re her trees. Nobody’s gonna let it get knocked down if her trees are there.”

“That would kill her, probably,” Thomas says. “ _Genii locorum_ are by no means invulnerable. But to answer your suggestion, Abigail, you know perfectly well police investigations are kept entirely separate from the Serious Fraud Office’s work,” says Thomas. “I doubt they’d be willing to co-operate, even if we haven’t opened an official investigation yet.”

“Officially, no,” says Abigail smugly.

Thomas eyes her. “Will it be helpful if I ask you to elaborate on that?”

Abigail purses her lips. “Ummmm…it probably won’t hurt?”

Thomas gestures for her to go on.

“My DS when I was in Fraud,” she says. “His partner’s an SFO investigator, he knows a bunch of other SFO people, he likes me, I think he’d be willing to ask them quietly.”

“As long as it won’t be suspicious,” Thomas concedes.

“Nah,” she says. “He wasn’t my direct supervisor.”

“Is this the one who had all those crazy stories?” Matt wants to know.

“Including the one about jumping off the building into the swimming pool, which I just _do not_ believe,” says Abigail. “That’s him.”

“Why not?” says Mal. “Better than jumping off onto concrete.”

“He claims it was, like, ten stories.”

Annie taps the end of her fork on the table, frowning. “Magic?”

“It would take a very skilled practitioner to survive that,” Thomas says. “I think I’d have noticed them, if they were in the Met. Probably.”

“Oh, well,” says Mal. “There go my dreams of leaping tall buildings in a single bound.”

“Right now you can’t walk up the stairs in a single bound,” says Matt, and then _ow_ when, at a guess, Annie kicks him under the table. Mal’s still not happy about her rate of recovery.

*

It doesn’t take Abigail long to come back with something.

“So nothing official,” she says. “But Bredon and the other guy were meeting with someone. Guess who.”

Thomas holds out his hand, unwilling to play this game.

“Hold on, I couldn’t take stuff away with me, I had to just take a photo,” she says. “Also, I think we owe them a favour now; sorry.”

“Who’s they?”

“Fraud,” says Abigail. “Also the SFO.” She holds out her phone. It’s a picture of a picture, obviously taken with a telephoto lens. Bredon is barely recognisable, and it’s not so much Lady Ty who Thomas recognises, though he does recognise her. It’s her car.

“So the question is,” Abigail says, “what does Lady Ty want with some Oxford graduates who used to play around with magic?”

“An alternative,” says Thomas. “To the Folly.”

“But we can’t go anywhere with this. It’s not evidence _of_ anything.”

“No,” Thomas agrees. “We need someone else they’ve talked to. The other one, Harrison, he was on a business trip to the States, is that it? Related to this, perhaps, given the timing.”

“Uh, I didn’t look into that, you’d have to ask Annie,” says Abigail. “But yeah.”

“California?”

“Yeah. Why’s that important?”

“I think,” Thomas says, “I might know who we need to talk to next.”

*

Richard Lewis had been one of the best sources of information he’d had when he was trying to sort through the debris of Berwick Street - the metaphorical, not the literal - more than willing, once it had been made plain to him the connection was known, to explain everything he’d ever heard about his old university friend turned black magician. Unfortunately, he hadn’t known enough to explain what the man had _wanted_ with Skygarden Estate, and nothing about the building had made it any clearer to Thomas - Sky’s presence, and her trees, surely couldn’t be it - but Thomas had come away convinced Lewis mostly wanted to get as far away from magic as he could. Shortly afterwards he’d quit his job with Southwark Council and moved to California, his husband’s place of origin, making him emphatically not Thomas’s problem.

It’s possible that there are other former Little Crocodiles lurking in the United States, and Harrison’s trip _may_ have had nothing to do with it, but it’s worth looking into. And, having investigated him all those years ago, finding that he’s returned to the home country for a visit is the perfect excuse for Thomas to go and speak with him. He takes Mal; she’s chafing at the bit to get out and do _something_ , and she’s officially off medical leave.

Lewis is clearly nervous to see Thomas again after all these years. He looks much the same as he did then; older, less hair, the usual sort of thing. He exchanges a worried look with his husband, an American of Asian descent whom Thomas hadn’t met when he’d interviewed Lewis before, but doesn’t refuse to speak to him and Mal without a lawyer. That’s a start.

“Inspector Nightingale,” says Lewis nervously, once they’re all seated. He hasn’t offered them anything to drink; probably wants to get rid of them as soon as possible. “And…”

“PC Malini Choudhury,” Thomas introduces her. Mal smiles brightly and inoffensively. “I’ll make this quick, if it’s possible. You were visited recently by a friend from your Oxford days.”

He doesn’t know that for a fact, but it’s a hit; Lewis stiffens. “Yes - what about it?”

“You won’t be surprised to learn,” says Thomas, “any association between members of your…group…is of interest to us.”

“It wasn’t illegal!” Lewis goes on the defensive right away. “It was just - he had a business proposition. You must know all about that. I thought it was because you were retiring, or…but you look exactly the same as you did the last time you interviewed me, and that was before my kids were born.” Thomas had spotted them briefly, through a window; teenagers, or very close to it, he’s never been good with estimating children’s ages. They must have come along quite soon after Lewis had emigrated.

“Police work is good for the skin,” Mal says, deadpan. Thomas flicks her an irritated glance, but she doesn’t look terribly repentant.

“Would you care to elaborate on that?”

Lewis doesn’t look like he would, but he does anyway. “You know - the consulting thing, on…magical stuff. I said no, I wouldn’t be interested in that sort of thing anyway, I have a job and I like it, and after - you know what happened. That’s all.”

“I do,” says Thomas, “and the thought that _any_ of Wheatcroft’s students could credibly do my job - you can’t have thought this was a plan I condoned.”

“I don’t know what you have against the rest of us,” Lewis says, setting his jaw. “You use magic; we might not have been doing it in the service of the country, or whatever, but we weren’t hurting anybody, it was just a bit of fun. Parlour tricks, really. Apart from – well, you can’t judge us all by-”

 “Did Wheatcroft ever teach you about demon traps?” Thomas asks. “I know he taught at least one or two of you, because I’ve had to disarm them.”

“No,” Lewis says cautiously. “That sounds unpleasant.”

“The Vikings invented them,” says Thomas. “You torture someone to death and trap their ghost. Unpleasant is the least of it.” Beside him, he fels Mal wince.

“He wouldn’t have -”

“He used dogs,” Thomas says. “I suppose that’s better. But I think you should ask yourself, if _at least he wasn’t torturing and killing other human beings on a regular basis_ is the best thing you can say of somebody, and you want to not be judged by your association with them -”

“None of that was anything to do with me,” says Lewis, now looking sick. “I was terrified of him, I told you; he would have killed me, I think.”

“You asked,” Thomas said. “What the difference was, between me and all of you. I swore an oath; what were you sworn to, any of you, apart from your own amusement?”

“Things don’t have to be serious like that,” Lewis tries to argue. “It’s not the nineteenth century anymore. It was just…anyway, it’s a shame, isn’t it, one day you’re going to die and then nobody’s going to know this stuff at all. I thought that’s what it was, you were retiring and there wasn’t anybody else. That’s all. I swear.”

“The world is rather wider than that,” says Thomas.

“Also, I’m right here,” says Mal. “I bet I’m better at magic than you already; you said you haven’t done it for thirty years. He’s not the last wizard in England anymore.”

“I wasn’t ever, really,” Thomas says, amused. “But not even officially, not now.” 

“You –“ says Lewis. “Oh.”

It’s hard to look down your nose at somebody with three or more inches of height on you, especially when you’re both sitting down, but Mal manages it quite effectively.

“Anyway,” Lewis says. “John asked me, I said no, that’s everything I know about it. I don’t want anything to do with it, all this – stuff. I have a family, I have kids. I have a life, a long way from here.”

“Did he say,” Thomas presses, “why they were so confident this scheme would work out?”

“I don’t think it was their scheme, really,” says Lewis. “Even if I hadn’t wanted to – it was something to do with a river, they said. I didn’t really get that part.”

“Which River?”

“The Tyburn. But – I figured that was a code-name for someone or something, not -”

“Never mind,” says Thomas. Mal catches his eye, her whole body tense. “That’s what I needed to know.”

Tyburn was trying to replace him with the Little Crocodiles; he can fill in that much. Thomas wonders why this feels so much more like an injury, even a betrayal, than every other time she’s tried to shuffle him out of the way in the last two decades, but he knows why. It’s the scream of demon traps, the rustle of red velvet curtains, the sound of bodies falling to the ground.

The question is, does Grant – did Grant – would he consider –

He can’t worry about that now. He knows what he has to do.

*

He’s been putting this off for years, hoping Tyburn’s efforts to define herself through politics and bureaucratic manoeuvring will fizzle out, or at least turn away from trying to define herself in opposition to the Folly. The moment he has to go to the goddess of the River and demand that she rein in her daughter, he’s admitting he can’t do it himself. He suspects that someone else – Peter Grant, say – might see it differently. But Grant was right all those months ago about that tightrope he’s ended up walking, and how easy it is to fall off it. Maybe it wouldn’t be very far, but he doesn’t know what the consequences would end up being.

The sensible thing would be to send one of the apprentices, but in the end it’s a problem that pre-dates them, and there’s the high chance Mother Thames would just demand he come himself anyway. Then he’d be attending on her request, and that isn’t the tone he needs to set. So he tells them he’s going out for the afternoon, and gets in the Jag, and drives to Wapping.

He does call ahead. There’s a difference between arriving on one’s own recognisance and arriving unannounced, and the greater _genii locorum_ have strong feelings about it.

They’re all there when he gets there; not just Tyburn, dangerous in a black skirt-suit, but all the rest of the River’s many daughters. He doesn’t know all of them well, if any, but he recognises them, Effra with her bright braids, Fleet with her Captain of Dogs at her feet – no good sign – Olympia and Chelsea almost indistinguishable in not quite the same outfits, even young Brent, who is old enough to attend university now and so not so young. It’s intimidating at the same time it’s a wonder; when Thomas came to London, a century ago, there was no Tyburn, no Fleet, no Effra, not to mention all the rest of them, just the painful echoes of their deaths, trickles running through sewers. Incongruous Lea in her pearls and twin-set, although back then it had been staid and slightly old-fashioned morning dress of the style now called Edwardian, is the only one who was there then. Nobody from the Folly would have predicted this, and yet here they all are. Thomas certainly wouldn’t have predicted it after Ettersberg, when magic seemed almost gone.

He's not sure whether he should feel the city is better for it, whether that’s just the Glamour speaking, but he thinks he does.

It's not just the Goddess of the River and her daughters there, though; Oxley is there next to Tyburn, confident but perhaps not entirely happy, standing out like a sore and very pale thumb with his hay-thatch hair. That really isn’t a good sign. The sons and daughters of the Thames tolerate each other, but they act together cautiously if at all.

Beverley Brook is standing to the right, with Neckinger and Rom and the other rivers of the south bank. She presses her lips together and shakes her head as he passes, very slightly as if to avoid notice, although Neckinger obviously sees and is confused. He’s not sure what she means by it, so he just nods to her.

“Good afternoon,” Thomas says, when he arrives before Mother Thames. She is sitting in her armchair like a throne – perhaps it is a throne, come to that.

"What brings you here, Thomas Nightingale?” she asks. “It has been a long time since you showed your face last.”

“I have my job to do,” he says. “I hear you approved of Constable Kamara; I’m glad.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go as far as all that,” says the Goddess of the River. “But she was a well-behaved girl. Not what I expected of an apprentice of yours.”

“I doubt any of them are, but they’re mine nonetheless.”

“You didn’t come here to gossip about your apprentices,” she says. “So what is it that you want?”

“There is an agreement,” Thomas begins. “Between the Folly and the Rivers. One of your daughters is trying to change that, to rid herself and perhaps you of the Folly. If you have a problem with it, bring it to my face, don’t send her to stab me in the back.”

“I have not sent any of my daughters to do _that_ ,” she says. “Nor would I. Tyburn - this is you, isn’t it, he’s talking about?”

“Yes,” Tyburn says, stepping forward. “It’s not behind his back, though; I’m merely trying to make sure he gets the same checks and balances as anybody else. We all know what happened fifteen years ago, with that magician. A witness turned up to the confrontation, and the next thing you know he’s trying to arrest him-”

“He committed a murder!” Thomas says. “He confessed to it. That’s nothing to do with wherever he may have been that day. What matters is that controlling me isn’t your business, Tyburn, it never has been; you don’t get to play both sides. I’m here to stand for the Met before the demi-monde -”

“What, community policing, now?” Tyburn sneers. “As if you know the first thing about that! You fumble around from on high, you don’t even know half of what’s really out there but you pretend you do to people who know better.”

“There have been complaints,” Oxley speaks for the first time. “You’re not here for us, you’re here for what doubtless you think of as the _normal_ folk. How can we trust that you’ll treat us fair when you said yourself you’d let those girls die to do your job? That’s what that lad you arrested said.”

All the excuses aren’t any good, not to that.

“I made the choices I had to make that day, to try and rein in a problem the Folly created,” Thomas says. “I took a gamble and I lost. Me by myself wasn’t enough, and that’s why I have apprentices, now. I trust you don’t have any complaints about them.”

“Apprentices,” Tyburn’s voice is very calm, now. He doesn’t think it’s a sign he’s out of danger. “Who you will no doubt teach to be the same as you, and where’s the difference there?”

“They can’t be the same.” He knows that for a fact. “The institutions that taught me and that I worked for are gone, and were gone before their grandparents were born.”

What he wants to say is that he doesn’t want them to just do what he would do; he’s still here, isn’t he, what good would that be; what he needs in apprentices is people who know how to look at the world differently. But that feels like an admission he can’t afford, not to Tyburn, not in this moment.

“If you mean they’ll be Newtonian practitioners, well, I can hardly train them to be anything else. It doesn’t seem you have any inherent objection to that, judging by the company you’ve been keeping lately.”

He thought, hoped, that might be a hit; certainly Mother Thames narrows her eyes, and some of Tyburn’s sisters turn their heads to look at her. He wishes he could see Beverley Brook’s face. But Tyburn doesn’t even flinch.

“Of course not,” she says. “There’ll always be wizards, whether you deign to notice them officially or not. But that’s the problem, isn’t it, Inspector Nightingale? You can’t even control your own, short of destroying your rivals. You don’t even pretend to. We had an agreement with the Folly, once, because you were the power in the land, all the wizards of Britain. You don’t represent that, not anymore, even with your new apprentices. So why should we be bound to an agreement with you?” She turns to her mother; of course, Thomas isn’t even the real audience for this speech, he realises with a chill. Mother Thames is, and Oxley, and everybody else in this room. “Why should we?”  

Mother Thames opens her mouth, and all of a sudden Thomas can’t predict what she’ll say, doesn’t know, but she’s interrupted by a commotion at the back of the room; Thomas knows better than to look around, still, but he hears Beverley Brook’s voice rising clearly above the fray. “They’re here for the Nightingale.” He has to look, then.

It’s Peter Grant, his uniform immaculately pressed and looking as confident as you please. Abigail shadows him in her best court suit, the effect tempered somewhat by the cloud of her hair bound only cursorily at the base of her neck. There’s nothing to tell on her face, but a hint of nerves in the way she has to move to keep up with Grant’s long strides. Beverley stays to the back, her eyes tracking them, a hint of satisfaction in her smile.

Grant arrives next to Thomas and removes his hat, tucking it under one arm. “Mama Thames.”

“Who,” says Mother Thames, “are you?”

“Commander Peter Grant of the Metropolitan Police Service, responsible for Community Engagement.”

“And what has that got to do,” Mother Thames nods regally around the room, “with me and mine?”

“You have an officer of the Metropolitan Police here,” says Grant. “I understand the community - your community - has complaints as to his conduct. Properly speaking, that’s my area.”

“Commander,” Thomas tries to break in, but Grant shoots him a sideways look. “Did you have something to add to that, Inspector?”

“No,” Thomas says, and because, if this is the game Grant wants to play, Thomas can’t undermine him in it, “sir.”

“If you are here for the police,” says the Goddess of the River, “why did you bring another wizard with you?”

“Abigail’s a constable, and only an apprentice aside from that. She didn’t really have a choice about doing what I asked her.”

Abigail is almost certainly glaring daggers at Grant for that, but Thomas daren’t look. It would spoil the effect.

“With no disrespect, Commander,” says Oxley, surprisingly, “I don’t think you understand what’s going on here. It’s not really to do with the Metropolitan Police Service, And you’re not…” He trails off, frowns at Grant. “This is the Nightingale’s responsibility, whatever rank you’ve got.”

“With all due respect, Lord Oxley,” says Grant, who has clearly and surprisingly done his homework – although Thomas rather suspects Beverley Brook’s hand in it – “this is entirely to do with the Metropolitan Police Service, and as Inspector Nightingale’s superior officer it’s very much my responsibility.”

Oxley laughs; Tyburn shoots him an irritated look. “I’m no lord, Commander Grant.”

“Very well then, say your piece,” Tyburn says testily. Her mother looks at her quellingly; Tyburn ducks her head.

“I think the first order of business is an apology,” says Grant.

That sets the cat among the pigeons in a way Thomas could only hope to; whispers run up and down the room, Mother Thames actually deigns to raise an eyebrow, Fleet looks very thoughtful. Thomas, in contrast, feels his spine stiffen.

“Things obviously haven’t been handled the way they should have been,” Grant goes on. “I don’t just mean on Inspector Nightingale’s part. I mean by our organisation as a whole. It’s our responsibility to ensure that all of our people have the support they need to carry out the full extent of their jobs, and Inspector Nightingale, regrettably, has not. I hope you understand that his taking on apprentices represents our first steps to remedy that.”

“As if what we want is more wizards,” says Effra, distastefully.

“I know your community is a lot more than that. If you know of anybody -” Grant gropes for a word “- relevant, who’s already working for the Met, then let us know who they are. I’m sure Inspector Nightingale would be happy to work with them. But in the meantime, he’s not accused of anything, he’s not _guilty_ of anything that would mean his removal from his position, so unless there’s a general feeling - which doesn’t mean one or two of you, it means among the whole community - that you can’t work with him any longer, he stays.”

“Mistakes,” says Tyburn, “were made, is that it?”

“No,” Grant says. “I read the report on Berwick Street. I talked to him about it. He fucked up. Sometimes we do that. This is why we have specialist staff for hostage negotiations. The trouble was that the only person who was capable of subduing the suspect was him, and if he failed then there wasn’t anybody else who could. It’s not a situation that lends itself to de-escalation.”

“That doesn’t fix anything,” says Tyburn. “It doesn’t make him any more likely not to fuck up again, as you put it.”

“When I first learned about the, uh, less conventionally explicable aspects of the Met’s role, as represented by the Folly,” says Grant, addressing Mother Thames and the rest of the Rivers as much as Tyburn, “I heard the word ‘agreement’ a lot. And that made sense to me, because that’s what this is, you know? We have to have agreement that we have our jobs, and what those jobs are. When that breaks down on either side you get - well, people start dying, mostly. What we have, the rest of the Met, I mean, that you don’t, is formal ways for people to _tell_ us when they feel like the agreements aren’t being kept. Not by bailing up individual officers.”

“You’re going to suggest an advisory group,” says Tyburn. She sounds like this isn’t an entirely ridiculous concept. Thomas does know about the Met’s Independent Advisory Groups, but the concept of having one for _genii locorum_ , or any other fae or practitioners for that matter, is -

\- more logical than it sounds at first blush.

“It’s worked,” says Grant. “Not perfectly, but it’s worked. Why not for you? Although - a problem we tend to have with them, generally speaking, is that the people who make the most noise aren’t actually the ones with the biggest problems, by and large. People who feel comfortable talking to us are already comfortable with us. I think the question also is: how do we find the people who don’t want to do that? You’re all goddesses.” He pauses, and nods to Oxley. “And a god, of course. It’s the people like Jacob Miller we need to be the most worried about.”

“There are people who don’t want to be noticed or found,” Tyburn shoots back. “I know you know that - those _Quiet People_ under their hill -”

“If people have reason to fear the consequences of being noticed, which frankly it sounds like they did for a very long time, then of course. But we fix that by making it safe for them. Not by pretending they don’t exist.”

“The Folly isn’t part of our world,” says Tyburn. “It stands against it.”

Thomas takes a breath to speak, because that’s unfair and untrue, but Grant’s ahead of him, of course.

“I don’t care if that’s true, or it ever was. It can’t be true any longer. _The police are the public, and the public are the police_. You want in, Cecelia, I know you do, because we’ve talked about it. And you can _have_ in. Special Constabulary, whatever, something can be worked out. But that means working by the same rules we have to. Up to you. All of you. Any takers?”

There’s a very special sort of stunned silence that is only ruined by Abigail making a faint squeaking noise, like she can’t keep her surprise in.  At least Thomas thinks it’s Abigail. It could be a River, he supposes.

“You have a lot of things to say, Commander Grant,” says Mother Thames, at length. “And a silver tongue to say them with.”

“Well, I get a lot of practice,” says Grant. “Comes with the job.”

“I want your oath on it,” she says. “You say you stand behind him, that he’s part of something you represent: you stand and fall with him, then.”

“On my mother’s life,” Grant says, not even a moment of hesitation, God damn him. “As a Commander of the Metropolitan Police Service. He’s ours, our problem, our representative, whatever else he is too. He does the same job we all do, for the people of this city, because we _are_ the people of this city.”

“Very well,” says Mother Thames, and Thomas can feel the power of it, another agreement made, like the tide and the rain and the wind off the sea, but like something else, too, the smell of fog and the faint shrill of a silver whistle. Oh, this is something, but he doesn’t know yet what. “Tyburn. Whatever it is you are doing, whoever it is you’re sending after the Nightingale - let it go. That’s not our agreement. Oxley…”

“I can consult my father, but I’ve no doubt that will satisfy him,” Oxley says. “He never liked this to start with. He’s no particular care for bureaucracy, nor love of the police, to tell the truth, but he understands standing with your own.”

“ _Mum_ ,” says Tyburn, almost desperate. “No. You can’t let him-”

“Tyburn!” her mother snaps, and she stiffens, closes her mouth.

“You may go,” Mother Thames says to Grant, and to Thomas. “But best if we don’t need to have this meeting again, hmmm?”

“Thank you, ma’am,” says Grant. “It’s been a pleasure. Cecelia.” He nods to Tyburn. She stares back, her eyes as black as coal. Grant’s burned that bridge, for certain. Thomas wonders if it will be worth it to him.

They turn to leave, Abigail - still a bit wild-eyed - falling smoothly enough in behind. The Rivers watch them go. It’s always difficult to walk away from something like this, the urge to speed up feeling nearly inexorable, but Grant keeps a measured pace a step behind him and it helps. When he gets outside, however, his dignified escape is ground to a halt by a deeply petty but very real problem: while he was inside, the Jag has been blocked in, and not by the slightly beaten-up electric Ford the apprentices share. (That’s a little off to the right; presumably Abigail transported herself and Grant there in it.)

“Didn’t really get a chance to warn you about that,” says Grant. “Sorry.”

Thomas sighs. It really has been that kind of day.

“I know,” says Beverley Brook, behind him; it feels like she’s always behind him. It’s starting to make him twitch. “Ty’s little power play, sorry. Give me five minutes and I’ll get them moved.”

“Why?” he has to ask.

She shrugs one shoulder. “I didn’t go to all the trouble of getting Peter in for nothing.”

He frowns at her, and she just looks back, unmoved; he wishes he knew what she wanted.

“I think he’s right, for what it’s worth,” she says, nodding at Grant - Thomas wonders how much time they’ve been spending together, that she calls him Peter. Or maybe it’s just that they’re young.

“Thanks for the support,” Grant says dryly.

“Don’t be like that about it.” She rolls her eyes. “You have a point; you made it stick with Mum. Ty’s also gonna hold it against you forever and a day, but I think you knew that.”

Grant grimaces. “Well, yeah. Had to be done.”

“Don’t worry yourself about the cars,” Thomas says. “I’ll see to it.”

It’s partly because of what’s just happened, and partly because he’s genuinely irritated, and partly because he can, and maybe somewhere deep down showing off a little for Grant, but it isn’t very hard, really, all things considered, to - with a few whispered words and a raised hand - knock over a handbrake or two, give a gentle push to get the cars going, and slide them carefully out of the way. Then re-engage the brakes, of course. Nobody’s going to be happy if their car ends up in their mother’s river, and he’s not out to make enemies.

(More impressive to lift them up, of course, but that much magic would certainly blow out the electronics and that would be just as bad as the river, maybe worse; it would seem more pointed.)

Beverley Brook just shakes her head - after glowering at her own bright yellow Mini, safely three cars away - and walks back inside. Of course, she was never going to be impressed. Abigail has her arms folded and is clearly trying to look like she doesn’t think it’s anything much, but the way she’s squinting says she wants to know how to do it.

“Nice, sir,” she says grudgingly.

Grant - Grant is grinning broadly, like he’s seen something beautiful and unexpected, and, well, that was the reaction Thomas was hoping for, even if he’s still not sure how he feels about Grant coming here like this.

Well. He is sure. He’s not happy. There’s something else, surging, that isn’t quite unhappiness but something else; he daren’t call it anger.

“May I offer you a lift, Commander?” he says.

“I’m getting the impression,” Grant says, the smile fading from his face, “you’re not happy with what just happened.”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Thomas says, before he can think better of it, of Abigail watching, of who might be listening, of the fact that they just need to leave.

“Oh,” says Grant. “Really.”

Thomas steps closer to him, keeps his voice controlled. “I know you meant well, but it wasn’t safe; you didn’t even know magic _existed_ a year ago, you don’t understand the power in that room, what could have happened to you -”

He just wants to make Grant _understand_ , this is his job, this is his responsibility, if he let something happen to a senior Met officer everything really would start to unravel, petty things like suspensions can be worked around or under but this, this is where the real powers come out to play.

“Fuck that.” Grant almost sounds like he can hear what Thomas is thinking. “This is my job. You were losing their respect, you know that, I know that. The entire _point_ of what I do is managing how people think about us, about the police, and it’s not your place to tell me no or how to do it.”

Thomas can see, out of the corner of his eye, Abigail open her mouth, then close it and step back, like the cars might hide her. They can’t do this here but it’s happening anyway.

“This is _my_ job,” he says to Grant. “If we’re going to talk about respect, you have to respect that.”

“Okay, Inspector, we’re done,” Grant interrupts him, speaking over his last few words. His eyes are very hard. “Go home. Try not to screw this up again, because Tyburn’s going to be looking for you to give her a chance.”

Thomas opens his mouth to say _wait, no, I didn’t mean it like that, I know what you were trying to do for me, I don’t,_ but Grant is already turning to Abigail. “Thank you for the lift, Constable. I’ll find my own way back.”

“Wait,” Abigail says quickly, “I can drive you, I brought you here -”

“I’ll walk,” Grant snaps, mouth thin with anger, and does exactly that, away and around the corner and out of sight.

_He fucked up_ , Grant’s voice echoes in Thomas’s head, and hasn’t he just.

Thomas drives very carefully on the way home. He’s in the sort of mood that leads to carelessness.

He gets back to the Folly before Abigail, and debates the merits of waiting for her in the garage; it wins out because he doesn’t want to have this discussion in front of the others. It’s not good practice.

“Sir,” Abigail says, when she gets out of the car and sees him waiting next to the Jag. “You’re better than the GPS, I got stuck in traffic going through the City.”

“How did you end up bringing Commander Grant to Mama Thames’ court, Abigail?”

She straightens, almost mutinously, all five foot five of her. “He came by and said he needed to go give you a hand, could he trouble me for a lift?”

And of course Thomas couldn’t expect her to say no to that sort of request from somebody of Grant’s rank; that’s not even a question.

“I don’t expect you to say no to a senior officer under those circumstances,” he says. “But. That isn’t the only way to handle that sort of situation. There will be times – there are always times, with our particular job, where somebody doesn’t understand the situation or thinks they know more than they do. Even being a chief inspector -” he gestures at himself “- isn’t always sufficient to the problem. You have to learn to work around it.”

“No, sir, that’s not - I would have said no if I’d thought it was the wrong thing to do,” says Abigail. “I did ask him why, first.”

“Oh, really?”

Abigail shrugs. “Look, we’re his pet project, he wouldn’t have been there today if that wasn’t true, if I can’t get away with asking him stuff in an emergency ‘cause of that, then when?”

“Really,” Thomas says again. “To be clear on this point: you knew what he intended to do, and you brought him anyway.”

“As opposed to letting him get the address from Beverley Brook or whatever and just getting a taxi?” says Abigail, somewhat incredulously. “Well, yeah.”

“He could have been in some danger.”

“Which is why it seemed like a _really bad_ idea to let him go alone.”

Thomas is forced to cede that point. “Nevertheless. You’re going to have to learn better stalling tactics.”

“I wouldn’t have stalled him even if I’d known you wanted me to,” Abigail says, like a thrown gauntlet. “He was right. And had the right to tell me what to do. Sorry, sir.”

“Oh, no,” Thomas says. “You don’t get to cite his rank and then say you obeyed him because you agreed with him. One or the other, Constable.”

He could swear she grows a couple of inches, standing her ground. _Wild horses can’t move her,_ Grant had said, months ago. “Do you really think it would have gone better if he hadn’t shown up? Because I don’t think so.”

“No,” Thomas says, simply. It takes her aback. “That’s not the point of this discussion.”

“Sir.”

“The point,” he continues, “is that if this is going to work, Abigail, you have to trust me, and you have to listen to instructions. They might not always make sense in the moment. They might not always make sense, after. But I can’t always stop to explain, or wait for you to decide if you agree. My job is to train you and keep you safe, as much as that’s possible, as much as I am capable. I need to know you believe that, or -”

“Of course I do!” Her voice rises and wavers. “I know that – sir, of course I – he said he could help you. I brought him because I thought he could help you. I’m not going to – I know about orders, but.” She flexes her fingers like she doesn’t know what to do with her hands. “Somebody has to look out for you, too.”

That’s not how it works, Thomas wants to say, but: maybe it is.

“Next time,” he says, “you could try and send a message ahead. There’s a remarkable range of options for that, nowadays.”

“Sir,” says Abigail. “I…yes, sir. Can I – do you need me to –”

“I’m sure you’ve got things to be getting on with,” Thomas says, and she nods emphatically and turns to go. She pauses in the doorway, though.

“Also,” she adds. “Sir? Check your phone.”

Thomas hadn’t even thought of it, through this whole thing. There are a slew of messages. The top one is from Abigail.

_On the way with Commander Grant,_ it says. _He asked for a lift._

He puts a hand on his face, squeezes his eyes shut, tries to take a step back.

Today is just not going well at all.


	4. Managing Expectations

Thomas is in the coach house, checking his email correspondence and devoting as little time as he can achieve to wondering how he’s going to make things right with Grant – easier when he’s got two of the apprentices also in the room doing tasks that require the use of computers – when his mobile phone rings. He feels the unaccustomed bite of nerves as he checks who the caller is; it’s the Commissioner’s office.

Something to do with Tyburn’s forced retreat, undoubtedly. He steps outside, onto the top of the spiral staircase, to answer it. The Commissioner’s PA tells him he’s wanted for a meeting this afternoon, if he’s available, which of course he will be.

“New case?” asks Mal. She’s due at the hospital this afternoon for a check-up and hoping to be given a clean bill of health; some experience with these things suggests to Thomas she is over-hopeful, but it never helps to say this before the doctors have voiced their opinion.

“No,” he says. “Meeting with the Commissioner, this afternoon.”

“Is that…bad?” she asks doubtfully; Matt has stopped typing and turned to look at him.

“I shouldn’t think it’s anything to worry about,” Thomas says. “More likely things being put to bed.”

Tyburn won’t take defeat easily, and likely will come back for another round in a few months – especially now she’s seen an angle of attack – but she won’t go against her mother directly. This represents, Thomas hopes, breathing room.

And who knows – if Grant gets his way, things will be changing. They’ll have to see. He needs to talk to Grant about that, figure out how and if they can carry through on what he said; but he needs a day or two to work out how. What to say, where to start.

*

“I understand your…training programme…is going well,” is the first thing the Commissioner says, as Thomas is sitting down after handshakes and pleasantries. Probably a good sign, that he’s been offered a seat.

“Yes, I think so, ma’am,” Thomas says. “I wondered how it would go with four of them, but they seem to offer each other reinforcement.”

“They’re all progressing with the…” the Commissioner waves her hand delicately “…the, ah, magic, as you might hope?”

“It’s hard to make direct comparisons. It’s a very different situation from my own training, and the only time we tried on-the-job training in an organised way, before, it was under a great deal of pressure and it didn’t go well. But yes, they’re all very dedicated.”

Which isn’t to say there aren’t obvious differences in their skillsets – Abigail is particularly good with ghosts for some reason, whereas Mal is undoubtedly the fastest to master a given _forma_ – but they would all have been considered, had they been students in Thomas’ day, to have the potential to be wizards of the first rank. Had any of them been likely to become wizards at all.

He wonders, not for the first time, how on earth Grant spotted that in all of them.

“Good, that’s excellent to hear,” says the Commissioner. “Still holding firm on the ten-years thing?”

“To achieve full mastery, undoubtedly,” Thomas says. “A little more or less, maybe, but nothing significant. There are no shortcuts with this art.”

“Hmmm.” The Commissioner’s brow wrinkles, just a touch. “And I understand that there have been some steps made towards greater community engagement, as well.”

“Commander Grant has made a number of helpful suggestions in that regard.” Thomas isn’t sure exactly what she’s heard about yesterday and feels it might be best not to encourage deeper inquiry into the whole thing, if she hasn’t.

“Yes,” says the Commissioner. “I know you’re aware there has been some pressure to re-open the Berwick Street inquiry, considering the relationship of those events to your latest case. I think you’ll be pleased to know that pressure seems to have evaporated. Rather suddenly. Probably for the best, all things considered.”

“Community engagement, ma’am,” says Thomas, which is probably unwise and yet somehow irresistible.

“Indeed,” she says. “Nevertheless –”

Oh. That isn’t good.

“– nevertheless,” she goes on, “there have been a number of questions raised about the suitability of continuing your unit with its current structure.”

Thomas doesn’t have a response to this, knows it must show on his face.

“You can’t be that surprised, Inspector,” she says with some irritation. “I told you as much when you came to complain to me about Commander Grant a few months back; he wasn’t the only one interested in your unit, he was just the only one who’d gotten into direct contact with you.”

“May I ask who these other people ‘raising questions’ are, ma’am?”

“From the Home Office and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime,” she says. “Connections of Cecelia Tyburn, I believe, and I think they both knew Charles Bredon, which explains –”

“You should consider the source very carefully, then,” Thomas interrupts her, unquestionably and unpreventably rude. Bredon was a Little Crocodile; these men probably are as well, or linked to them. He knew Tyburn had been looking them up. He should have looked harder into where they’d ended up, all Wheatcroft’s students; not just whether they’d continued to practice magic or not, but who they’d become.

“I am aware of your opinions in that regard,” the Commissioner says, coldly. “ _Nevertheless._ That doesn’t affect the basic validity of what has been said. The Folly has existed within the Met in its present form – that is, you – for eighty years. It’s become obvious that’s insufficient to the extent of the problems it exists to deal with, and while you’ve taken steps to address that, unwillingly as far as I can tell, more wizards is not a solution in and of itself. A discussion needs to be had about how you operate, the extent of the independence of your operation, and – I hate to say it, but it must be said – how long you intend to remain in your job. I know the usual response is ‘until they carry me away in a box’, but for you…I don’t think that’s an answer this organisation is equipped to deal with.”

She smiles sympathetically, like she really does dislike saying it, but it’s the last bit that really knocks the wind out of Thomas’s sails. He remembers that conversation with Tyburn. _How long are you going to keep pretending?_ He hadn’t thought – it had just been another of her gambits, surely.

“That sort of decision,” he forces himself to say slowly, “doesn’t stop with you, ma’am. As I’m sure you’re aware.”

“I’m very aware,” she says. “Which is why a meeting has been called, and not by me. I believe the Home Secretary intends to be there. The Mayor as well. Nothing’s been decided, but if you have opinions about the future of your organisation, then I suggest you prepare yourself to offer them. And – a word to the wise – ‘this is the way we did it for two centuries’ isn’t going to cut it.”

“Ma’am,” Thomas says. “I see. Has a date been set?”

“Monday.” Three days.

“If I may ask. To what extent have Commander Grant’s views on the Folly contributed to this…this discussion?”

“A great deal,” she says. “He was the first person to point some of this out. This is taking place well above his level, though.”

“I see,” Thomas says again. “If that’s all, ma’am–”

“It is.”

He stands up.

“Inspector Nightingale,” she says. “Nothing has been decided. I don’t personally think you do a bad job. I think you do a very good one, under conditions that have been, from what I understand, sometimes difficult. I think you’re genuinely trying to make sure the job keeps getting done. That isn’t at question. The question is whether that can be enough.”

*

His first instinct is to hunt down Grant and demand to know whether this is his doing, but even if Grant is in his office and available to talk, it’s not the sort of discussion he wants to have at New Scotland Yard. He deliberately makes himself leave the building with, not suspicious, but steady speed. His second instinct is to find a fight he actually knows how to deal with, but he doesn’t have any messages on his phone, so there’s likely been no new cases in the two hours he’s been away from the Folly, and anyway he doesn’t have the time right now for that. His third instinct, which is less an instinct and more a thought, is to find out whether this is all Tyburn’s doing in a roundabout way, so he calls Beverley Brook.

“This better be quick,” she says. “I’ve got patrol in half an hour. I thought you were all sorted out yesterday; Mum told Ty to back off, and Oxley liked what Peter said enough to agree. Like I said, she’s not going to forgive you, but she’ll hold off for now.”

“Then why am I being called to a meeting with anybody with any sort of supervisory power over me on Monday to discuss the Folly’s direction?”

“I don’t know,” says Beverley Brook. “My best guess? Ty’s been talking to a lot of people, stirring things up, for months now. Just because she’s stopped doesn’t mean stuff’s going to get un-stirred. This isn’t a problem of _our_ world. It’s politics. You know – the regular sort.”

“My favourite thing,” Thomas says, not disguising the sarcasm. “You didn’t mention this before.”

“You didn’t ask,” she says. “And you’re the Nightingale; you’re supposed to know this stuff without me or anybody having to hold your hand. Talk to Peter, he did ask questions.”

“I don’t –”

“I’ve got to go, some of us have our own jobs to do.” She hangs up.

*

One of the useful things about trying to track down people high enough up in the food chain is that their schedule is not just known to them, if you know who to ask; Thomas calls Grant’s office, meaning his PA, and inquires if he’s in.

He’s too professional to give any details, but lets Thomas know that Commander Grant is in meetings until six but something can probably be arranged next week; Thomas thanks him and says he’ll call back. It means Grant will be forewarned, but that might not be a bad thing.

It gives him about three hours to figure out what he wants to say. He still doesn’t know. If some of this is Grant’s idea – he thinks he’s right, obviously, but then why bother intervening with Mother Thames at all?

The apprentices want to know what his meeting with the Commissioner was about, of course. It’s Abigail who actually asks, at dinner.

“Tyburn has, apparently, backed off,” he tells them. “I don’t expect any trouble from that front for a while.”

“Stephen said she’s furious,” says Abigail.

“Stephen?”

“McAllister-Thames?” volunteers Annie, with a hesitant sideways glance at Abigail.

“I’m not surprised,” Thomas says, and does not ask why Abigail and Tyburn’s eldest son are in communication. He suspects he doesn’t want to know the answer.

He doesn’t tell them about the Commissioner, or the meeting. Not yet. There’s time.

He knocks on Grant’s door about eight o’clock; he got into the building by the simple expedient of tailing somebody in, his suit and general appearance doing the job. Hopefully Grant’s not still at the office, or out, or entertaining anybody. It’s a risk he’s just going to have to take.

Grant opens the door. He’s still in his uniform trousers and shirt, but the tie and jacket are gone; there’s a smudge of something, possibly flour, pale and starkly contrasted against his skin, on his right cheekbone. Thomas tries to remember whether he’s angry or not. It’s all a bit of a mess.

“Okay,” Grant says. “You were not who I was expecting.”

“Were you expecting somebody?”

“Not in particular,” Grant says. They stare at each other for a few moments.

“I just need to know,” Thomas starts, wearily, at the same time as Grant says “Fine, okay, come in.”

They stare at each other some more. Grant steps aside. Thomas enters his flat, for the second time.

It’s messier than it was then. Grant’s obviously been cooking; something’s in the oven, he’s holding a tea-towel. There’s a half-drunk bottle of Red Stripe on the kitchen bench.

“I don’t mean to interrupt your dinner,” Thomas says.

“Well, then you’ve got about…” Grant pulls out his mobile phone, squints at it. “Twenty-five minutes.”

“This morning, I thought I owed you an apology,” says Thomas.

“You do.” Grant is blunt. “I was just expecting it to take at least a week before you came to that conclusion. What changed your mind between now and then?”

“Give me _some_ credit,” Thomas says. “I came to that conclusion about two minutes after you walked off. Abigail was quite distressed you didn’t let her drive you back.”

“Only because she thinks I might hold it against her, which I won’t. Two minutes, really?”

“I didn’t…express myself well. I know what you were trying to do.”

“That doesn’t sound much like an apology, I’ve got to say.”

“I’m sorry,” Thomas says, “but what you did, it wasn’t yours to do, and I couldn’t–”

“I think we had this conversation, Inspector,” Grant says, deadly calm. “You do not, in point of fact, get to tell me what to do.”

Thomas is suddenly teetering on the edge of a precipice he hadn’t recognised until too late, lulled by the domesticity of the setting and the flour on Grant’s face. “I didn’t – I appreciate – I didn’t ask you to do any of this.”

“You wouldn’t have, would you?”

And, no, of course not; the way Grant sees the Folly, sees Thomas, sees his place in the Met, is not a way Thomas would ever have thought to see himself; the idea of asking someone above him to go to the court of the Goddess of the River would have felt like an abdication of his responsibilities in the most fundamental way.

“Look, here’s the thing I’ve learned,” Grant goes on, apparently reading something from Thomas’ face. “I can’t know everything you know about your job, and it would be stupid for me to try, because all that would equip me for is doing _your_ job. But I know enough by now to know the scope of what you do, and I know what my job is, which is to make sure everybody in the Met can keep doing their jobs. And everybody in the Met includes you.”

Thomas thinks about saying something, doesn’t.

“You know this,” Grant says. He tosses the tea-towel at the bench, folds his arms. “You know it because you’re perfectly happy to let the forensics team do their jobs, or your constables – your apprentices – chase up leads, or Fraud hunt down financial details, or whatever. But apparently the moment someone above you tries to take the least bit of responsibility off your shoulders, that’s, what, too much? The city’s only safe if you’re the only thing standing between it and magical chaos? That’s the _deal_ , Inspector, for those of us who get to tell you what to do. We get to take the fall if it goes wrong. I know you know that for your apprentices. You need to know it for yourself.”

“What you did,” Thomas manages, “it was dangerous.”

“Mama Thames isn’t stupid,” Grant says dryly, “and Lady Ty still thinks I might be useful, one day, even if she’s angry now. I don’t think it was danger of anything more than humiliation.”

“I don’t,” Thomas says. “How you see this working – I’m not sure anybody else does.”

“The Job’s the job,” says Grant. Thomas can hear the capital letter “You don’t get to pick and choose which bits of it you want to exist. I don’t care how the rest of the Met thinks of it.”

It’s been a very difficult week, is Thomas’s sole and rather pitiful excuse for what he does next; that and it’s just that he doesn’t quite know how else to say _where have you been, why did you only show up now_. Kissing Grant probably doesn’t convey that adequately, come to think of it.

If Thomas had thought about this, and he’s not admitting he _has_ , but hypothetically, he would have thought that he and Grant would crash into each other like they had the first time, the sort of hot quick thing that flares out and can be forgotten the next day. Instead Grant kisses him back almost gently, almost seriously, and all of a sudden it feels like something fragile.

Thomas is tired of being broken, doesn’t want to break anything else, and puts both his hands on Grant like mapping the territory slowly will ensure a successful campaign.

Damn it; he doesn’t want this to be a war. Grant pulls him in closer, and he goes unprotestingly.

It’s Grant who stops first, all the same, deliberately relaxes his hands, rubs his thumbs soothingly where he was clutching as if to smooth away invisible marks.

“This isn’t going to help.”

“Distractions rarely do,” says Thomas.

“You’re not a distraction.” Grant’s eyes are wide and dark. God, Thomas wouldn’t mind being a distraction, right now.

“We need to stop meeting like this,” he says in lieu of anything more serious; it works.

Grant laughs. “You’re not wrong.” He takes a breath, lifts his hands away. Thomas steps back, though not far. He still hasn’t managed to – this is going all wrong.

“What I came to say is,” he says, “the Commissioner called me in today. Tyburn’s been forced to relent for now; what she set in motion is still going. I have a meeting on Monday with a few people, including the Home Secretary, to, and I quote, discuss the Folly’s future direction. It was…implied…you had something to do with it, although the Commissioner did say it was above your pay grade. I – want to know if that’s true.”

“You think I _set you up_?”

“I don’t know what you want.” Thomas thinks about this. “Most of what you want.”

“Yeah, apparently,” says Grant, incredulously; they’re still not very far apart. “The Home Secretary?”

“The Home Office is ultimately responsible for the Folly.”

"Right, I knew that. Huh. I guess that explains why you weren't sure whether I deserved an apology or not."

“I’m sorry,” Thomas says again. “Thank you.”

“Want a beer?” Grant asks.

Thomas blinks, has to think about this. “Certainly.”

*

“So,” Grant says, once beer has been provided. “Tell me what the Commissioner said. Tell me exactly what she said.” They’ve sat down at Grant’s small dining table; the kitchen area still feels dangerous to Thomas. He keeps making terrible decisions while standing there.

Thomas relays the details as best he can remember them.

Grant groans. “You don’t need me to tell you this, but you’re in _so_ much trouble. And I think I know why.”

“Do go on,” Thomas says.

“Tyburn’s been talking to a whole lot of people about the Folly,” Grant says. “People who already know about magic. Turns out there’s more of them than you think, and they all seem to have gone to university with Charles Bredon, and…”

“The Little Crocodiles.”

“I hear that’s what they call themselves. I don’t know exactly what her plan was, because I made her cautious enough to back off a long time before she told me much of it – not that I’m sorry about that – but it went something like this: get rid of you, not like _that_ , I mean shuffle you off to retirement or whatever, shut down the Folly, establish some sort of consultancy for magical cases - public-private partnership, candidates for the worst three words in the English language, by the way. Overseen by her, of course, to _give the community a stake_ , and then, well, there’s all these Oxford graduates floating around who know something about magic, aren’t there? Who never did anything illegal, at least not that they’ve been caught at. And there was no way to get your opinion on it reasonably because you were, and I also quote, _blinkered by your past experiences_.”

Thomas had put some of it together, but this is - it goes beyond what he’d figured out. “Bredon was…”

“One of the people she was in touch with? I think so. I think that’s why he ended up in that alley. He was looking for Miller – because Miller was an eyewitness for Berwick Street, and that was the most fail-safe way to get rid of you. Since old age clearly wasn’t doing the trick.”

Thomas props his elbows on the table, runs his fingers through his hair, lets himself sag. “And how long, exactly, have you known about this plan?”

He looks up at Grant, who looks down. “A while. I told you, remember? Not even that long ago. That you weren’t the only alternative.”

“Withholding judgment, you said.”

Grant grimaces. “I use my long words when I’m tired, and I seem to remember being that close to passing out in Molly’s kitchen. She wouldn’t have been impressed.”

“She wouldn’t have. You came to a conclusion, I take it.”

“Yeah,” Grant says, looking up and meeting his eyes. “I did. The way she wanted to do things, it wasn’t going to work. The way you were doing things, it wasn’t going to _keep_ working, but you know that; you were the kind of person who could know that. That was enough. But I spent a while asking questions, first, and I don’t think this is _just_ the result of that, but it’s a contributing factor. There’s no Mama Thames to intervene in this; it’s got to too many people. Your only choice is to ride it out.”

“Then I’d better start marshalling my arguments,” Thomas says, standing. He hasn’t even drunk a quarter of the beer. “And I believe your dinner’s about to be ready.”

“Thomas,” says Grant, deliberately, looking up at him. “The meeting’s Monday, right?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want,” Grant gropes for a word. “Help?”

A loud, instrumental theme Thomas vaguely recognises but can’t identify begins to sound; Grant jumps and shoves a hand in his pocket. It’s his phone alarm.

“Thank you, sir,” Thomas says. “No.”

He sees himself out before Grant can respond.

*

Thomas has had to give plenty of reports over the years, verbal and written; the point is to convey the facts of the matter, of course, but in the way your audience is going to hear and understand. There’s never, though, been anything quite like this. Before the war, before Ettersberg, he’d been brought up into a system whose existence far predated and extended beyond him. Even with the way he’d been regarded, that slightly ridiculous sobriquet he’d gained at Casterbrook, _the Nightingale_ , he’d never been that high in the chain of command, for good reason; his best work was done on the ground. He’d gone where he was sent and, for the most part, done what he was told. There’d never been any question of change, except during those tense years leading up to Ettersberg when it was only a question of if they could find more men and how quickly. Or if there had been, it hadn’t filtered down to Thomas.

Afterwards, when the agreements had had to be remade, when most of his colleagues were dead and the rest retiring or anticipating doing so, he’d still been operating in a half-fugue state. It had been agreed that he would handle any magical questions for the Met, or the nation, if necessary. He’d been handed the remaining administrative functions – the Folly, Casterbrook, the trust that funded them – and then, or so it seemed at this late date, everybody had promptly vanished. Only the younger ones were left, and they’d all been junior to him anyway. But at no point had there ever been any question of – of not continuing, not really. Still less of change.

The closest he’d gotten had been the inquiry into Berwick Street, and even that had been something he was more familiar with: defence of his actions in, well, action. Had he made the right decisions in the moment? Could deaths have been prevented? Were there lessons to be learned? They’d concluded that he had, and they probably couldn’t have been, and the lesson was that he couldn’t expect to be the only wizard in Britain any longer. But when he’d asked for permission to take an apprentice, more strongly, he’d been refused: told that under the circumstances, more magic didn’t seem like the answer. His lengthy investigation into the rest of Wheatcroft’s Little Crocodiles had been not in part intended to support the argument that he needed back-up, a potential replacement. He hadn’t found anything conclusive, and eventually he’d let it go. It wasn’t as if he’d had a suitable candidate lined up. Nobody wanted their constables to spend too much time talking to him.

He had thought he was safe, though; thought that at least those above him had been convinced of the problems with changing things – but the French _Academie_ had been re-organised out of existence in the ‘60s, hadn’t they, and most of the other Continental powers had new structures. The Germans hadn’t even started scraping anything back together until after the fall of the Wall, as far as he was aware, and he still wasn’t aware of much. The point at which he’d thought it useful and necessary to start seeking out those connections – around the time Varvara Tamonina had stumbled out of hiding – had been almost the same point that Britain had cut itself off from the Continent again, this time not with fog or war but basic diplomatic ineptitude. He suspects, knows, based on some of the things Varvara had eventually told him, that some of those foreign agencies might even have known more about what was going on in London in the sixties and seventies – the Soho club, the first faceless magician, if there had indeed been two of them – than he had. That’s an indictment on his own performance if ever there was one. He wonders if it’s going to come up on Monday.

But this, making an argument for…what? The continued existence of _a_ Folly? The damnable thing about Tyburn’s whole “consultants” scheme – apart from the fact that she’d found it palatable to go to Wheatcroft’s students at all – is that it isn’t too far removed from how the Folly had helped the Met before the war. There’d been wizards in every walk of life, Thomas himself in the Foreign Office, others at universities and in other areas of public service. Some had been serving police officers, but largely they’d been consulted when needed. Thomas’s own existence within the Met is an accident of history. That’s half the reason the rest of the Met looks sideways at him when they remember to use his services at all. The apprentices are all constables, but maybe they think that half-trained, not that they were even that at this stage, will be good enough; maybe they want to disperse them again, make them proper police officers, their magic only a quirk to be overlooked. The only answer he has for that is that they aren’t ready, and the question then will be: what if they were? What then? 

The other question, the question of his own continued presence, continued youth – well, extended middle-age, no need to gild it – he equally doesn’t have a real answer for. He doesn’t have any intention of retiring. He doesn’t know what else he’d do. But he’s clearly outrun the Met’s institutional tolerance for that sort of phenomenon, and it isn’t as if he could pledge to start aging again: he wouldn’t know how.

And Grant, having _known_ some of it, withheld that information, all the while acting like he wanted to help Thomas, like he might want Thomas. He doesn’t know where to start with that. Still doesn’t know, exactly, what he wants. Could want.

He goes to bed that night without any answers.

*

They don’t have an urgent case and it’s the weekend, which means lessons are off the table – Thomas does appreciate the value of rest – so aside from one of them staying on call, and of course practice, which is an everyday requirement, the apprentices aren’t guaranteed to be around. Thomas tells them about the meeting scheduled for Monday over breakfast, on Saturday. It won’t make the meal go down any better, but that really can’t be helped.

“The Home Secretary is responsible for the Folly? Directly?” says Annie, wide-eyed.

“Up the chain from the Commissioner, but yes,” Thomas says. Matt has paused mid-way through a bite of toast; it’s quite disconcerting.

Abigail narrows her eyes thoughtfully. “I thought you said Mama Thames had told Tyburn to back off.”

“This is nothing to do with Tyburn,” Thomas says. He’s very aware of Molly, hovering in the doorway. “Or, to put it better: it’s not directly to do with Tyburn. She just…set things in motion.”

“On a scale of ‘one to us getting shipped back to the units we came from on Tuesday’,” says Mal, “how bad is it?”

Thomas has to think about this idiosyncratic scale. “Five?”

“Well,” says Matt, who has finally put his toast down. “You can’t trust the English to run anything properly, can you. Typical.”

“Thank you, Matt,” Thomas says.

“Oh, it’s okay, sir,” he says. “I didn’t mean _you_.”

 As they’re getting up, Abigail keeps looking at him like she wants to ask a question; but when he prompts her directly, she shakes her head. “No. Nothing. Just – nothing.”

“Is there anything we can help with?” Annie wants to know. “Research, or, or…something.”

“I’ll let you know if there is,” Thomas promises.

“Anything at all,” she says again.

"Hold on, not anything, I still can’t run anywhere fast,” says Mal, waving the cane she’s been told to use. She doesn’t use it half as often as she should.

“I don’t think this is the sort of problem that can be solved by running,” Thomas says to her.

“I’ve got it!” Annie says. “We all run across the border and ask for asylum. I’ll sponsor you and all.”

“And leave London?” Abigail pokes her head back in. “Fucking hell, it’s not that bad.”

“Speak for yourself,” says Matt. “There’s other perfectly good cities, you know.”

“I keep getting told that,” says Abigail, “but nobody ever gives me any proof.”

*

Thomas still does his best thinking with a pen and paper – typing is for finished copies – and retreats to the magical library to do so; the apprentices don’t go there unless they’re looking for him. Molly appears with a pot of coffee around mid-morning. Normally she disapproves strongly of consuming anything in the libraries, it’s an ongoing battle with the apprentices (Thomas doesn’t mind as long as they’re careful). He wonders what would happen to her, if….it’s one of the reasons he can’t go anywhere, was his reason sixty years ago, when everybody wondered why he stayed in the Folly with its – strictly metaphorical – ghosts. Could he convince anybody that she genuinely can’t leave it? Would they care?

She reads over his shoulder while he’s pouring coffee; she must be anxious, though that’s never easy to tell, with Molly.

“I’ll get this sorted out,” he says. “You don’t need to worry.”

The best thing he can do, he’s fairly certain, is to remind them of what the Folly has done; all the things that have been prevented, smoothed over, put quietly to bed; that Mother and Father Thames are at peace with each other, that things are working, by and large, and that now he has apprentices it’s going to be easier. He thinks about everything Grant said, about community engagement and all the rest of it; he needs to remind them that it goes beyond the Folly, of the people he works with in other parts of the Met, Inspector Kumar in the BTP, Abdul at UCH, the archives at the Bodleian. Beverley Brook, coming to ask about Grant; Varvara Tamonina, on the fringes of the demi-monde, obliging enough if he approaches her, even if she doesn’t tell him everything. That he’s not alone here, doing this.

All the time the Commissioner’s voice is saying to him, _the question is whether that can be enough_. They know what he does, and apparently it isn’t enough. How can he explain that it is?

Is it?

 

*

He doesn’t work on it all weekend, makes himself take breaks, go for a walk, put the cricket on the wireless. The apprentices come and go, check up on him and try to pretend they’re not. Molly hovers, but not incessantly. He thinks half-a-dozen times about Grant’s offer of help, doesn’t call him. He has to do this. Grant’s the cause of half this problem, not its solution.

He takes notes, rearranges them, types them up, keeps looking for the magic phrase that’s going to solve this, the incantation that will explain why the Folly doesn’t need fixing. He hasn’t found it yet. That’s alright; he’s always been better at thinking on his feet.

He’s interrupted on Sunday afternoon by Abigail and Annie, asking him to come out to the coach house.

“Is this work-related?” he’s cautious enough to ask.

“Totally,” says Abigail. “Cross my heart.”

“Peter - Commander Grant asked us to show you something,” says Abigail, once they get out there. She holds up a laptop computer.

“Yes, Abigail, I know what that is,” Thomas says, trying for minimal sarcasm.

“We didn’t think you didn’t!” Annie reassures him hastily. Thomas pretends not to notice Abigail making a hand-rocking gesture of uncertainty at the edge of his line of sight.

“He wanted us to explain to you about Powerpoint,” Abigail goes on.

“It’s Keynote, it’s a Mac,” says Annie.

“Whatever, it’s all the same thing,” returns Abigail; Thomas’s limited experience of computers suggests this is probably not true but as he _is_ somewhat unsure of the difference, he doesn’t say so. “I mean, sir, you must have sat through plenty of presentations by now, this stuff’s been around for forty years.”

“Sat through, stood through, occasionally slept through at the back of the room.” Annie bites back a smile. “Would you mind explaining exactly what it is you’re supposed to be showing me?”

Abigail puts down the laptop, flips it open, pulls out a small black device Thomas recognises as a laser pointer. “You’ve seen them, but you haven’t _given_ one, right?”

“They’re generally a distraction to the actual point people are trying to make.”

“Well, you’re not wrong,” Annie offers, “but Commander Grant asked us to make sure you knew how to go through one just in case, so if you don’t mind, sir?”

“In case of _what_?”

“He didn’t say,” Annie says doubtfully.

“I dunno, but I’d be worried if I was you, he’s got an _idea_ in his head,” says Abigail. “Here - take this.” 

*

Grant arrives just before eight p.m. in jeans, a nondescript dark blue hooded sweatshirt, and carrying a USB drive like it’s the Crown Jewels.

“Your mum would have a fit if she knew you were at work in jeans,” says Abigail.

“Isn’t it lucky for all of us, particularly you, Constable, that I’m an adult and she’s never going to find out,” says Grant. He looks about ten years younger, maybe more than that. “You’d be amazed how easy it is to get overlooked dressed like this.”

“Yeah, until someone stops you and you have to show them your warrant card,” Abigail says gloomily. Thomas doesn’t find this terribly likely, neither Abigail nor Grant being that suspicious, but Grant just says “Well, they’d be letting the side down if they didn’t stop nondescript Black guys in hoodies, wouldn’t they?” and Abigail gives a half-amused _hmph_ in agreement, so clearly he’s underestimating the odds.

“Anyway, it’s done,” Grant goes on. “Where’s the laptop?”

“What’s done?” Thomas has to ask.

“The presentation you’re going to give the Commissioner tomorrow,” says Grant.

“No,” says Thomas.

“Would you give us a moment, Abigail?” Grant asks politely.

Abigail flees. She’s a smart girl.

“No,” Thomas says again. “I don’t -”

“Listen.” Grant plugs the drive into the computer. “Multiple people have just spent a lot of time getting this together, including but not limited to me, Molly, and the goddess of Beverley Brook, so yeah, actually, Inspector, you are.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Grant says, “the only way to win this is to beat them at their own game. Tyburn’s been shut down for _now_ , but she’s successfully sold you as the washed-up relic of a dead era who’s at best struggling with and at worst actively damaging to the modern Met’s goals. You need to prove you’re not, and you can’t do that with a stiff upper lip or a good speech.”

“Beverley Brook, you said.”

“She’s willing to be convinced. And she knows things about the demi-monde you don’t.” Grant looks up; he’s opened a file. “I know you said you didn’t want help. Trouble is, the consequences of this go beyond you; it’s not about what you want, not anymore. Most of what I do is trying to persuade people about things. We can change it, we can make it right for you, whatever, but how you need to say it for the audience you’ve got: that’s what I know, let me give that to you.”

He swallows. “Look, I know you probably think I haven’t been straight with you and I guess I haven’t. I was still making up my mind. But it’s made up, I told you that, and I’m not letting you go down because you’re angry with me. Now will you sit down and go through this with me? Please.”

Thomas sits down. Dressed like this Grant looks softer around the edges, and he knows it’s its own sort of message, coming here like this, like they’re friends, like he can afford to not be Commander Grant within the walls of Thomas’s home, like that’s why he’s doing this.

He wants to say, _I owe you for this_ , but if he starts that he’ll never stop; obligation doesn’t have to be magical. And there aren’t even, as far as he can tell, any strings attached, personal or political. Just Grant’s view of _the right thing to do_.

God, he can’t deserve this.

Ten minutes later he’s thinking the same thing, but in precisely the opposite way.

“I’m not saying _prioritising public involvement!_ ” he exclaims as he moves forward through the slides. “For god’s sake.”

“Thomas,” Grant says grimly, arms folded like he’s trying to keep them prisoner, “you will go in there and you will say _prioritising public involvement_ and _managing expectations_ and, so help me God, _going forward_ , if I have to make it a direct fucking order.”

“Sir,” Thomas says, because what else can you say to that.

Grant relaxes. Fractionally. “ _Thank_ you.”

It goes more smoothly after that; Grant had meant what he said about _how you need to say it_ , is mostly focused on making sure Thomas is offering words that will be understood. And making absolutely sure he understands the technical details of operating the device.

“I’m not sure what you think is going to happen,” Thomas says.

“Magic and electronics aren’t exactly compatible,” Grant points out.

“Yes, and if you think I’m planning on bringing magic into this at any stage except when I’m strictly required to mention it – I know how this audience is going to feel about it.”

“Fine, I know, but…” Grant shuts the laptop. “There’s a great word in German. _Vorführeffekt_.”

“Can’t you just say _demonstration effect_ in English?”

“Yeah, but it sounds better. Anyway. Technically this isn’t a demo, but under the circumstances…it means that any time you’re trying to show off something new, it goes wrong.”

“I,” says Thomas, “am somewhat the opposite of a new thing, in this context.”

“I just want this to go right,” Grant says quietly. “I was trying to make your unit better, make things _work,_ not get you – fired isn’t right. Put aside.”

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy,” Thomas offers.

Grant looks at him sideways, a smile playing on his lips. “Question is: who’s the enemy?”

“There isn’t one, really. That’s the tricky part about this kind of conflict. No victories, you just minimise your losses.”

“Only holds if you think you’re responsible to the whole organisation,” Grant says. “Or the whole city. Or whatever.”

“I don’t think you know how to be responsible to anything less.”

Grant shakes his head. “You’ve got to stop looking at me like that; it’s going to go to my head.”

“Like what?” asks Thomas, but he thinks he knows.

“Like,” Grant says. “Like I can do magic.”

*

He knows from Grant that the meeting is going to be in one of the meeting rooms at New Scotland Yard, not the Commissioner’s office, even though the message telling him that doesn’t arrive until Monday morning, a couple of hours before he’s due there.

“There’s a room bookings system,” Grant had explained. “I had my PA check who had what for Monday.”

“Is that technically a legitimate use of resources?”

“I could have needed to have a meeting with somebody,” Grant had said in faux-innocent tones. “It’s still police business. Anyway, I’ve had to fill him in on some of it, he was getting a bit suspicious, especially when I was still meeting with Tyburn. I think, for a while there, there was a rumour I was liaising with some big organised crime operation. All that sneaking around.”

Not an entirely ludicrous rumour, of course; Grant had spent a few years in Intelligence.

“Anyway,” Grant had said. “There’s nobody in there before your meeting, so make sure you get in early and set up. I bet it’ll catch them off guard.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good thing at this stage.”

“I think they’re as lulled into a false sense of security as you’re likely to want.” More than a touch of irony there.

By eleven a.m. he’s got everything ready to go, is not sorry, in the end, about the lesson he’d got from his apprentices in how to use the computer for this; better to be safe than sorry.

The Commissioner knows he’s early, of course, that information will have been conveyed when he signed into the building, and so does not look surprised to find him there when she enters the room. The others do; or perhaps it’s the computer. They’re all carrying tablets, so really, he doesn’t see why it should be such a surprise. It’s not as if he still insists on using a typewriter or the like. He’s lived with computers longer than any of them have, technically speaking.

There’s hand-shaking, and introductions and re-introductions – he’s never met this Home Secretary – and tea and coffee are brought in, and then the knives come out. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Nobody’s tried to stab Thomas literally for, oh. It must be at least half a century.

"I told Inspector Nightingale,” says the Commissioner, “that this meeting would be to discuss the operation of the Folly – the Special Assessment Unit, that is, within the Met.”

“Yes,” says the Home Secretary. “I think, first, we should offer Inspector Nightingale the chance to describe how he sees the current purpose of his unit. And how effectively he feels it’s functioning.”

“Thank you,” says Thomas, before anybody else can speak. “I have some slides. If that’s all right?”

They all look at each other, clearly not sure where this is going, and by silent and common consent the Commissioner says “Er. Certainly, Inspector.”

It’s all set up, so all Thomas has to do is pull out the clicker Grant has lent him and begin.

“The Folly is something of an anomaly within the modern Metropolitan police service,” he says. His words, not Grant’s. “It was founded in the mid-eighteenth century by Sir Isaac Newton to encourage the systematisation of the practice of magic, which is not, traditionally, a police matter.” He pauses. You have to remember to pause; nobody hears you when you rush. “But the important thing isn’t how long the Folly has been around. It’s how it has changed.”

*

He doesn’t get to go all the way through without questions, of course; that wasn’t the point.

“You want to control the course of the meeting,” Grant had said. Thomas may or may not have rolled his eyes. “Okay, fine, you knew that. But this gives it structure; they’re going to be responding to you. I bet they don’t have a set agenda.”

“Oh, really?” Thomas had said. “I can imagine it. Apologies, introductions, epitaphs, end of meeting in time for lunch.”

“That’s not an agenda,” Grant had said. “That’s a motivation.”

The Mayor, in particular, is rather interested in the section on how much of London’s population is likely to intersect with magic over their lifetimes; he wants to know where the data come from, and Thomas can point him at Beverley Brook, who had spitballed estimates with Grant. She’s not going to thank him for it, but she’d effectively volunteered.

The Home Secretary makes faces when Thomas talks about the Soho club, and the Russian diplomat Varvara had extricated in a half-hearted burst of patriotism; apparently that hadn’t made it through the right channels to be added to the tally of Thomas’s sins. The Commissioner gets very thoughtful when Thomas explains about the County Practitioner system that used to exist, and the solutions – and, it has to be said, problems – it had offered.

He hates to admit it, but Grant was right about the language; they perk right up at phrases like _advisory group_ and _community feedback_.

“What you seem to be saying is that you don’t necessarily envision everybody in your unit being a, uh,” says the Commissioner. “Practitioner?”

“Everybody in our unit needs to be aware of and able to deal with magic,” Thomas replies. “That encompasses quite a wide range of people, many of whom are not practitioners. The Folly of the past – the main position was that practitioners of the art were the only bulwark against…to be quite honest I’m not sure what, anymore. But in general it divided up the world we dealt with into two groups; members of the Folly, and everybody else. That goes, fundamentally, against the principles of policing. It has to change. It already is changing.”

She nods; he thinks he’s scored a point.

“That was,” the Home Secretary says when they wind to the end. “Not what I was led to expect from you, Inspector.”

“I didn’t put this together on my own,” he says readily. “The rest of the unit helped, including our civilian station manager. She’s possibly the most technologically adept of us, actually.”

“I thought she was,” the Commissioner says, and stops.

“About my age?” says Thomas. “Yes, she is.”

“Hmm,” the Commissioner says thoughtfully. The others do not ask questions, which Thomas is most grateful for; he really doesn’t want to have to explain Molly in detail. There’s only so much you can expect people to deal with.

“My question,” says the Mayor. “Is why now?”

“I knew it was timely for me to take on an apprentice fifteen years ago,” Thomas says. “I couldn’t find anybody. I knew it was past time fourteen years ago, after Berwick Street. I was refused permission before I even started looking.”

“Is that true?” the Mayor asks the Commissioner.

“A decision that predates my time,” she says. “But yes, I believe so.”

“Well,” says the Home Secretary. “As I said, this is a very different picture than I expected.”

“Your…apprentices,” says the Mayor. “I take it you have full confidence in all of them?”

“Entirely,” says Thomas. “No question about it.”

“Gentlemen,” says the Commissioner, “do you think we could wrap this up? I have a lunch meeting.”

*

Despite saying this, she lingers a little after the others are gone.

“Do pass on my congratulations,” she says.

“To the rest of the unit?”

“Yes,” she agrees, “but also to Commander Grant, for what I suspect was his considerable effort. I heard about the scene with Lady Tyburn, you see. I’m surprised the Mayor hadn’t.”

“Her mother did put her foot down,” says Thomas. “But yes. I’ll pass that along. He was – very helpful.”

“That wasn’t him talking, though,” she says. “That was all you. You believe it, all those things you said.”

“Is that so hard to believe, ma’am?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” she says. “But you present all sorts of difficult things to believe, and yet I have to deal with them in the flesh; of course you wouldn’t be any different.”

“Ma’am,” Thomas says, not sure how to take that.

“What would you do with yourself,” she asks, “if you could step away, one day?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas tells her, honestly. “But I can see the possibility of needing to find out.”

 

*

Thomas was wondering if he’d see Grant around, afterwards, but he leaves New Scotland Yard without incident; probably for the best. He should head right back to the Folly, let everyone know it went well, but he’s sidetracked by a call from Thames Water which it really seems best to handle himself. Or, not quite himself, but he gets there shortly before Walbrook does and she seems happy to leave him to it for the most part, probably because even river goddesses like to be dressed for the occasion and she’s in a skirt suit and her river is, to give it the most charitable possible description, principally underground. (Thomas was once witness to a fellow police officer describing the Tyburn as ‘basically a big sewer’ in the presence of its goddess, when she was younger and rather more subject to impulse; the unsettling thing hadn’t been how thoroughly she’d dealt with him, but that it had happened two months later. In hindsight, Thomas rather thinks, a sign.)

He eats lunch on the run and arrives back at the Folly a little before five o’clock. He’d left a message with Molly that he was dealing with a minor case, but he doesn’t get halfway down the back corridor after hanging up his coat before all four of his apprentices appear, almost stumbling over each other, so perhaps he could have been a little more reassuring.

“Afternoon, everybody,” he says. “Anything to report?”

He is the recipient of four of the most unimpressed looks he has ever seen on human faces. It’s almost charming.

“Noooooooo,” says Abigail. “How about you, sir?”

“I had what I think can be described as a productive meeting,” he says. “The main upshot of which is that nobody needs to worry about going anywhere.”

“But are you sure?” bursts out Matt.

“Yes,” says Thomas. “I’m quite sure.”

There’s a sort of breathless pause while it sinks in and then an outbreak of relieved smiles. Mal gives a cheer. Annie pats him on the arm awkwardly, grinning hugely, and then snatches her hand back like she’s touched a hot stove.

“It’s okay, you can give _me_ a hug,” Mal says like she’s offering a favour, and then looks startled when Annie does, squeezing so hard Mal gives a little _oof;_ then she picks Annie up with one arm and twirls her around, only half-leaning on her cane. Matt is slapping Abigail on the back and smiling so hard it might break his face in half; Abigail throws an arm around his shoulders, a slightly difficult upwards trajectory, and pulls in the other girls, too. They are all, for a second, uncomplicatedly happy.

It’s a good sight, Thomas thinks. A very good sight.

“We should go to the pub,” says Abigail, as they pull apart. “Sir, you’re coming, right?”

“Well, only if I’m wanted,” says Thomas.

“Oh, get your coat,” Abigail orders, a little imperious, and for once – for the occasion – Thomas does as his apprentice says.

*

They don’t really have a local, or at least Thomas doesn’t – his last having closed down in the eighties and he himself having aged backwards too much for it somewhat before then – but the apprentices all seem to know where they’re going so he follows them. He’ll have to make a note to avoid wherever it is unless asked, in future. You have to let people have their space, and they all have to live with him.

Abdul is already there, holding what looks like a ginger beer; he’s talking to, of all people, Beverley Brook. Thomas, because there are rules about these things, shouts all the apprentices their first round before he gets a chance to talk to him. It’s still early enough, especially on a Monday, that the pub is still relatively empty.

“I hear I’m still going to be filling up all the MRI techs’ spare time for the foreseeable future,” Abdul says. “Not that you come in as often as you should.”

“If I was going to fry my brain on the job it would have happened by now,” Thomas says, even though he’s only at best half-sure of that.

“I hear you made an impression,” Beverley says. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Thank you,” says Thomas. He does know his manners. “I’m told you helped.”

“Were you told about the trade-off?”

Thomas, in point of fact, had not been. “May I guess it has something to do with the – what was it called again – Independent Advisory Group?”

“Good guess,” says Beverley.

“I wouldn’t really call that a trade-off,” says Thomas. “One or more of your sisters would have to be part of it, regardless.”

“Just lucky for you that you get me, then,” Beverley says. “Molly didn’t want to come along?”

“You know she doesn’t leave the Folly,” says Thomas.

“You never know,” says Beverley. “Maybe one day.”

She stays long enough to finish her drink and chat with the apprentices; they all seem quite comfortable with her, particularly Abigail, but then she’s almost if not quite old enough to count Beverley as a contemporary.

“What’s an independent advisory group?” Abdul wants to know once she’s gone.

“They have them in all the boroughs,” Annie offers before Thomas can get a word in; she’s on the edge of the current conversation between the apprentices. “To tell us when we’re upsetting people, more or less.”

“There are advisory groups at the corporate level, too,” says Thomas. “Race relations, disability, LGBT, that sort of thing.”

“And this would be one for…” Abdul gropes for the right word. “The community you’ve got to deal with?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Well,” Abdul says. “I can see how that could be useful. Or terrifying.”

“Both,” says Thomas. “Undoubtedly.”

Abdul has to get home to Finchley, and Thomas has just about finished his drink – the apprentices are chatting away and clearly won’t mind or notice his absence. Abdul goes over to say goodbye to them, and Thomas is about to make his farewells too when a voice behind him says “I hear congratulations are in order. Can I buy you a pint to celebrate?”

Thomas turns around; it’s Grant. He opens his mouth to say _Commander_ , then realises all of a sudden how profoundly inappropriate that would be, here, now, and says nothing.

“Or not, not is fine, I just wanted to let you know I’d heard the good news, say hi to the apprentices,” Grant says gently, and Thomas finds his voice.

“I’ll have a pint, if you’re buying.”

Grant grins sunnily at him and goes to the bar, stops to say hi to the apprentices on the way there. He’s not in uniform, but he’s wearing a suit jacket; Thomas experiences a profound and sudden desire to see him dressed casually again, see what he looks like on the weekends, when he wakes up in the morning.

“Thank you, Peter,” he says when Grant comes back with the drinks, having made up his mind to it. He was asked, after all. All those months ago.

Grant grins again, the expression he accused Thomas of wearing too often, his eyes crinkling at the corners, and good god, how long has it been since Thomas was the cause of that sort of happiness in somebody else, not in the abstract but directed at him? It’s an addictive feeling. Maybe that’s how Grant - Peter - how Peter feels about it, too.

“Thomas,” he says, for only the second time, and they toast each other.

*

They end up ordering food, settling in a little. The apprentices have drifted further away to a table of their own and been joined by some others their own age; a young Asian woman with deep auburn hair, wearing a suit, has her arm around Mal’s shoulders, and Thomas is reasonably certain he recognises Stephen McAllister-Thames. He’s definitely not going to ask.

“Who’s Abigail’s bloke?” asks Grant, who presumably doesn’t know better. “Looks familiar but I can’t remember why.”

“Tyburn’s eldest,” says Thomas. Grant looks, at least, suitably worried.

“Oh, well,” he says. “Abigail knows what she’s doing.”

“Most of the time,” Thomas says. “I couldn’t comment when it comes to that.”

“Problem for another day,” Grant concludes.

In mutual but unspoken agreement, they don’t talk about work; instead Grant ends up telling him about a childhood trip to Sierra Leone, with his mother, and Thomas recounts the small amount of time he spent in West Africa, so very long ago now.

“My mother’s been telling everybody that Abigail’s a witch-finder,” Grant says. “She seems to think it’s much more respectable than being a police officer, and more impressive. I’m not sure Abigail’s father feels the same way about it, but more people listen to my mother, anyway.”

“That’s,” Thomas says. “Accurate from a certain perspective?”

“Entirely accurate, from her perspective,” corrects Grant. “I just can’t believe she thinks it’s more respectable than being a police officer.”

“Naturally,” says Thomas. “That was definitely the perspective in my family.”

“I don’t believe you,” says Grant, but he smiles as he shakes his head.

They’ve come to a sort of natural pause in the evening; the apprentices are definitely past noticing whether Thomas is there or not, so he doesn’t feel the need to make a point of farewelling them, anymore.

“So,” says Grant.

“Come home with me,” Thomas says. “If you’d like to. We said _maybe later,_ a while back. I think that’s now, or not at all. Which is – also a reasonable answer.”

“No,” says Grant - says Peter. “I mean, yes. I’d really like later to be now.”

 

*

Peter Grant kisses Thomas in Russell Square, quick like a promise. It’s the sort of stupid thing that might not be as unsafe as it once was but still prickles across his skin, or maybe that’s just the cooling autumn air.

“Third time’s the charm, I hope,” says Grant. Peter.

“The charm for what?” Thomas has to ask.

“I don’t know. Getting this right.”

“Magic’s no good for that,” says Thomas, and takes him inside.

“I was this close to asking you out again, a lot of times, if you hadn’t guessed,” Peter says, after kissing him again on the back doorstep – magic’s no good for this, but there’s a certain kind of power to thresholds.

“I can’t imagine what might have given that away,” says Thomas, remembering all those times Grant, Peter, had not quite fallen into him, in Peter’s flat, the night he’d come to the Folly tired and worn around the edges. “You didn’t think it worth the risk, I take it.”

“Things were up in the air,” he says. “You, this, you know what I mean. I decided I couldn’t help you and sleep with you. Might as well have handed Tyburn a stick to beat me with. Us with. That’s _if_ you forgave me for not telling you everything.”

As if Thomas didn’t know that. “Seems to me like you were splitting hairs on the difference.”

“Would have been a difference if I’d been asked directly, I don’t know about you,” says Peter. “I’m a terrible liar. Ask anybody who knows me.”

“I’m not sure I believe that,” Thomas says. “For one thing, there’s no way you’d have survived past sergeant.”

“Are you accusing me of lying to senior officers?”

“I think misleading senior officers about things they think senior officers don’t need to know takes up at _least_ half the brainpower of the average junior officer, but do correct me if I’m wrong.”

“Really,” says Peter. “Misleading is one thing, but ask me a direct question, the answer’s all over my face. At least that’s what Lesley’s always claimed. And my mum. Maybe it’s just Lesley and my mum.”

“Well, I’m neither DCI May nor your mother,” Thomas feels obliged to point out.

“Go on, then,” Peter says. “Ask me something; I’ll show you. Can’t lie to save my life.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know; anything.”

Thomas doesn’t bother with a question, just steps in close and kisses him again. Peter doesn’t even pretend to be surprised, pulls him in close and kisses back like he’s starving for it, his long lean body pressed up against Thomas like he can get rid of their clothing through sheer willpower. 

“Want to go to bed?” Thomas asks, when they come up for air, like that’s not why they came back here.

“God, yes,” Peter murmurs.

“If you’re lying,” Thomas says, “I certainly can’t tell.”

Peter looks so outraged that he has to kiss him once more, and then that’s the end of conversation for a while.

*

Grant doesn’t hesitate to fall asleep in Thomas’s bed, an act of trust in Thomas’s book, and follows up by waking Thomas up the next morning in the best possible way. They have quiet, sleep-drenched morning sex of the sort Thomas hasn’t had since – since he really can’t remember when. He’s never brought anybody back to the Folly before, in the rare event there’s been anybody he could have brought. It never seemed like a good idea.

“Breakfast?” Thomas asks before he heads into the shower. “As I said once about dinner – there’ll be plenty. Molly’s probably already set you a place.”

“I…you know what? Yeah, that’d be great, I have an eight a.m. meeting and otherwise I’d have to scrounge something on the way to the office,” Grant says. “If you’re okay with the rest of the household knowing I was here.”  

“As we’ve discussed, it takes ten years to train a practitioner to full capability,” Thomas says. “And like as not they’re going to be living here for most of that, so I’m not going to spend the next decade pretending not to have any sort of personal life. They’re adults.”

“I’m not convinced about Abigail, actually,” Grant says. “But okay.”

They’re the first to the breakfast room – there is a spot for Grant, Thomas was right – and they’re already eating when Annie appears. They’ve come to a compromise between Thomas’s opinion that breakfast should be dressed for and the mores of the twenty-first century; nobody wears what they wore to bed, but Annie’s in track bottoms and a slightly ragged _Free Scotland_ t-shirt, and her strawberry-blonde hair is distinctly un-brushed. She frowns, recognizes Grant, and stutters to a halt.

“Morning,” Grant says cheerfully. Molly stole his suit overnight and pressed it; you’d need a critical eye to know he’s wearing yesterday’s clothes.

“Sir,” Annie says. “Good…morning?”

Grant smiles and nods. Annie only spills a few drops of coffee when she pours; Thomas thinks she’s doing rather well.

“Uh,” says Abigail when she appears. She is, of course, somewhat more inured to the notion that Commander Peter Grant is a human being who eats breakfast than the rest of them. “Very early meeting?”

“Yes,” Thomas ruthlessly perjures himself; it’s just not a topic he wants to even seem to imply about. “It seemed rude to throw Commander Grant out without breakfast.”

Grant makes a slightly choked noise around a bite of toast. Thomas busies himself with his breakfast and pointedly does not observe his apprentices’ expressions, although he can’t help noticing when Mal’s bad leg buckles as she enters the room and Matt has to save her from a nasty fall. He catches Grant’s eye; Grant shrugs slightly, as if to say, _told you so._ Thomas tries not to smile, but ends up hiding it behind his cup. 

Overall, it’s the quietest breakfast at the Folly since the apprentices showed up. Also one of the nicest.

*

Thomas does appreciate what the apprentices have done with the loft above the coach house, television included, but they’re indulging in rather raucous viewing of some show about home baking and even if his presence wouldn’t cast a pall on things, he doesn’t have the energy. (Molly seemed to be enjoying herself when he poked his head in, however, which is really quite charming to see.)

He supposes he could always find a pub and watch the rugby - the opening matches of the World Cup are tonight - and then he wonders what Grant is up to, and then he wonders if Grant even _likes_ watching rugby, which he probably doesn’t.

He calls anyway. “What are you up to?”

“Reading reports on my couch, the really glamorous part of my job. Actually I was supposed to look at these last week, but you know what happened. You’re welcome to come over and listen to me complain about how misleading all these graphs are.”

“Do I have to sit on the couch?”

“Because my mother brought me up right, guests get the armchair.”

“I have to warn you,” Grant - Peter, he reminds himself - says ruefully when he opens the door to his flat, “I really do have to finish reading these tonight. On the other hand, I have Sky Sport and beer in the fridge.”

“Oh, is that so?” says Thomas.

“I hear there’s some sort of rugby tournament on,” Peter goes on. “But probably you don’t care.”

“Is there? I’m not sure I was aware of it.”

“I only say this because Molly is furiously live-tweeting the Great British Bake Off, so I have a suspicion you’re cut off from your own television. Which I understand: constables are one thing, but I wouldn’t try competing with Molly.”

“You knew exactly why I called you,” Thomas accuses him.

Peter just grins. “Like you mind.”

Thomas kisses him hello, to show him exactly how much he minds.

He ends up on the couch anyway, which is just as uncomfortable as advertised, possibly more so with Peter’s legs in his lap; he doesn’t mind that much. They find the game on TV, and the commentary is punctuated in the slow parts by Peter waving a tablet in front of him and demanding he agree that a particular graph is, really, _totally_ unacceptable and a crime against the art of communication. Thomas nobly does his part by agreeing.

They don’t talk about anything to do with their jobs at all; the report Peter’s reading isn’t even from the Met, at least based on the headers. Even with at least two springs poking into him, Thomas feels himself relaxing. It’s one of the nicest evenings he’s had in a while. It’s –

– a _relationship_. He’s not sure when that happened. How did that happen?

“Are we,” he says out loud, not even sure he wants to. “Are we. Is this…”

He gestures helplessly between them.

“I dunno,” Peter says. “But you should definitely sleep with me at least a couple more times to make sure.”

Thomas pokes his foot, since it’s lying there all vulnerable and within reach. Peter yelps.

“You’re going to have to put in slightly more effort than that,” Thomas says.

“Good call,” says Peter. “Otherwise, do we really have to talk about it?”

“No,” Thomas replies immediately. “Absolutely not.”

“Great. Perfect. Let’s not.”

Thomas pretends to pay attention to the game for a few minutes.

“We’re okay DPS-wise, though,” Peter adds eventually. “If you were wondering. _I_ was wondering. I just got this job, or it feels like I just did, I’d like to keep it a while.”

“What did you do, _ask_ them?”

“God, no. I spent some quality time with their policy manual.”

“Well, _that_ sounds like fun.”

“Honestly,” says Peter, “compared to what some of my colleagues are up to, I’m not even trying with you, but it’s the Caesar’s wife thing, you know.”

“I’m not sure I take your meaning.” Thomas has always hated classical metaphors. They’re usually heavy-handed at best and poetic at worst.

“What was all that classical education for, then?” Peter relents. “Having a wife you barely see and a mistress on the side - preferably not one of your colleagues but let’s not pretend it doesn’t happen - is _normal_. It goes along with acquiring a sudden passion for opera, about the time you hit DCS.”

“Now that I’ve never understood.”

“Me either,” says Peter, fervently. “And yet. My point is - taking up with a _male_ DCI has a whiff of scandal about it that the other doesn’t, even these days. Not like when I was a constable, or when you were - were you ever a constable?”

“No,” Thomas has to admit. “It was sort of a sideways career change.”

“So best to plan ahead,” Peter concludes. “Make sure it’s by the rules. In case somebody does want to make a fuss down the track.”

“That sounds like an exhausting way to think about the world.” Thomas has never liked politics of any sort, prefers to inhabit a known place.

“Yeah, but I don’t have to chase people down or blow things up with my mind, so: six of one, half a dozen of the other. I’ll take the politics. It’s less stressful, all else being equal.”

“Let me guess, there’s a study?”

“I was generously not going to burden you with it.”

They toss back and forth the merits of holding various ranks for a few minutes; Thomas has spent almost his entire career at his current rank, Peter had a slow start and then an exponential rise.

“Strictly speaking, you should be a DCS,” Peter muses, “you’re the head of an OCU and it’s not like seniority’s a problem. But then again you didn’t have anybody to supervise for – nearly forever, there, so there wouldn’t have been much point.”

“The principal use of rank,” says Thomas, “is to get people to pay attention when you speak. Any higher and I’d never get anything out of the people on the ground.”

“I’m just saying we would have had a lot less trouble with Tyburn’s whole attempt to uproot you if you’d been a DCS. That was one of the arguments she used, you know. With people who didn’t know better.” Peter shifts position a bit, probably avoiding a spring. “Who knows, keep acquiring people and maybe they’ll bump you up eventually.”

“That really isn’t my goal,” Thomas says, remembering that conversation with Tyburn.

“Oh, well,” says Peter. “Still wouldn’t be an issue for about another three decades, the rate you’re going.”

By which point he’s likely to be retired, he doesn’t say, and neither does Thomas. No point borrowing trouble.

“You do keep making my life more complicated,” Thomas says instead, reaching for the remote; the game is over and it’s just the usual post-match blather, _it was a game of two halves_ and so on. He rather feels for players these days; they never tried to make them answer questions when it was just on the radio.

As he switches the television off, Peter swings his legs off Thomas’s lap and sits up. The couch makes a rather alarming noise.

“Thomas,” Peter says, sober now. “I’ve been trying to make your life _easier_ , believe it or not.”

“You were trying to make things right.”

“That too,” Peter allows. “But seriously – after I got briefed – there’s _magic_ and _river goddesses_ and all these other things, and people _die_ , and all we put up against it is you, on your own, and try to pretend it doesn’t matter and it doesn’t affect the rest of us? Like the people who have to deal with it aren’t part of this city, too? It was fucking irresponsible. I couldn’t let it go on like that.”

“It doesn’t matter that it was me on my own,” Thomas says. “Do you think it was better before the war? Do you think we practiced _community policing_? We said “fae” for everything we didn’t understand, the same way the Greeks said “barbarians”. I gave up trying for more because I wasn’t the person who could do something better than that. I didn’t know where to start.”

“I know,” says Peter, but it’s not unkind. “So I thought I’d help you along.”

“Whether I wanted it or not?”

Peter shrugs. “I thought I might be able to persuade you that you wanted it, eventually.”

The innuendo clearly isn’t intentional, but Thomas ducks his head and laughs all the same. “Did you, now.”

“Thomas,” Peter says again, and puts a warm hand on his knee. “Making this work is more important than anything else. So tell me if –”

Thomas looks up, and Peter is biting his lip, and something about this is heart-stopping, undeserved; what has he possibly done to have someone like Peter Grant looking at him like that?

“Consider me persuaded,” Thomas says, and covers the hand with his own.


	5. Epilogue: A Fork in the Road

“I was thinking about it,” Peter says one day in October, when they’re walking back to the Folly through Russell Square. He wants a look at the county practitioner records. Thomas isn’t sure what the outcome of this will be, but is – perhaps – almost looking forward to finding out.

“Thinking about what?”

“You said you’d tried to find apprentices, a few years back. I wonder what would have happened if you’d tried with me?”

“You were busy rising meteorically,” says Thomas. “I don’t think you’d have been tempted.”

“No, but, see,” Peter says. “I got things together fast enough, but there was this point – I did my probation, I wanted CID, and they sent me to the Case Progression Unit. Lesley got assigned to the Murder Squad, plainclothes. I just about died of jealousy. I thought my career was over before it had started.”

“They were setting you up for management,” Thomas says; he’s seen how the system works. “They wanted you to be thinking about how cases are run, how all the pieces fit together.” Playing to Peter’s skills; look where he’d ended up.

“I know that _now_. But then – I mean it: I thought I was doomed to paperwork forevermore. Well, I wasn’t wrong, but it gets more interesting the higher you get.”

“Also, it gets easier to delegate it to other people.”

“That too.” Peter grins. “What I’m saying is – if you’d asked me, back then, those first few months, before I got pulled into a CSU, offered to teach me magic…I’d have said yes. No question. So fast your head would have spun. And _then_ what would have happened?”

Thomas contemplates the prospect of Peter Grant as he must have been as a constable: ambitious in an unassuming way, frighteningly intelligent, maybe less confident than he is now, but still that solid determination under it all. “I imagine you would have learned magic.”

“I imagine I would have driven you absolutely bonkers,” Peter says cheerfully. “Even if you’d had the ability to tell me to just shut up. Not that you’d say it like that.”

“I think I would have survived. But it would have been frustrating for you, I think – there wouldn’t have been anywhere for you to go.”

“Immortal senior officers are a problem in that regard,” Peter concedes. “Still – I don’t know. It’s an interesting thought.”

The world might have been better, is what Thomas thinks. If he’d had Peter sooner, Peter’s vision, Peter’s certainty, Peter’s drive to learn. What ifs, though, they don’t help. They never have.

“I’d have liked that,” he says instead. “Driven bonkers or not. But I think I like you where you are, too.”

“Yeah,” Commander Peter Grant says, as they mount the steps of the Folly. “Me too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everybody who has read, kudosed, or commented while this has been going up! 
> 
> I talked in the notes for Changes of Perspective about the two types of AU; this is mostly Type A, What Would Have Happened If…, the “if” in this case being “if Peter had joined the Case Progression Unit and never learned about magic”. It wasn’t meant to be, but, uh, plot happened to me. Oops. 
> 
> The OC apprentices in this story (Matt, Mal, and Annie) are all borrowed from my [post-canon-ish future-fic series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/194090); I liked them too much to invent new ones or just stick with Abigail. 
> 
> I did do some research into the organisation and structure of the Metropolitan Police Service, as well as their policy on community engagement, for the purpose of making Peter sound vaguely like he knew what he was on about, but a) this is set ten years in the future from the present (hence all the hints about the fallout of Brexit), and b) I didn’t do _that_ much research, so please excuse any unintentional errors.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Wizardry by Consent](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11462055) by [Lazulus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lazulus/pseuds/Lazulus)




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